Unsettling photos of Kim Jong-un: A brief history

The latest photo of the supreme leader from North Korea's state media shows Kim Jong-un visiting a lubricant factory (really).

Amid the maniacal laughter he found time to impress the importance of making North Korean products more attractive to buyers.

Despite only replacing his late father in December 2011, Kim has racked up an impressive portfolio of unsettling photos...

If Kim Jong-un looks upset, that's because he is; with North Korean meteorologists for consistently getting weather forecasts wrong. In official speak he is offering 'field guidance'.

He gives field guidance a lot.

Sometimes near an actual field.

And the generals are always making notes.

No matter the circumstances.

Sometimes the generals aren't sure if the supreme leader is clapping, or just warming his hands, so they hedge their bets and do both.

Kim Jong-un constantly tours facilities with generals to get the latest on North Korea's state-of-the-art military hardware.

They also take very awkward school photos together.

Very awkward.

So very awkward.

Strangely, for the leader of a Stalinist necrocracy, Kim Jong-un smiles a lot. Of course this isn't creepy at all.

Not at all.

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It's not just generals that admire him.

No wonder Kim Jong-un looks so happy in the above photo, he'd just visited a mushroom farm.

If this looks like an obvious photoshop by the official Korean Central News Agency, that's because it was.

This photo convinced Chinese state media that Kim Jong-un had won a sexiest man alive contest. He had, but only courtesy of the Onion.

Meanwhile, Denis Rodman.

But amid the chaos, a peaceful moment of reflection.

Wait...

Oh.

That makes more sense.

This article seems silly, but it makes a good point. The man in the right of the ninth picture down is Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un's uncle through marriage. The former de facto number two in the country was executed last year after being branded a counter-revolutionary, "worse than a dog", "human scum", and accused of perpetrating "thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him". According to reports his body was fed to dogs in front of other officials, while a supporter of his was executed by flame-thrower.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of prisoners, mainly of them political, languish in the gulag inside North Korea, with disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions rife.

Many, many more people face malnutrition and starvation in a country that is one of the world's poorest but nevertheless spends up to 25 per cent of its GDP on the military.

(Pictures: KCNA/AFP/Getty/Reuters/EPA)