Attack of the Badly Drawn Boy, 2000

With Attack: Badly Drawn Boy, Banksy trades his usual stark monochrome for an unusually playful, and oddly poignant, palette. On the left, the titular crudely rendered orange stick figure seems to frolic innocently, unaware of the horde of urban figures charging toward him from the right. The figures, more realistically rendered, symbolize the angry masses, conformity, or perhaps even the modern art world itself, set on devouring anything that dares to be naïve or different.

Banksy places this confrontation in a flat, stylized cityscape—where joy and violence meet in surreal choreography. Is the boy the last vestige of childhood? Of outsider art? Or just a doodle caught in the wrong neighborhood? With a wink and a warning, Banksy reminds us that in a society obsessed with polish, innocence might just be hunted down.