Sketches Of Eddie

According to Tom Chase, a new age Christian writer who has used astrology and the bible to calculate when the antichrist will emerge, that date is today. 6/6/06. His emergence will be followed by an asteroid collision and a two year battle of Armageddon. The name of the antichrist? He says it's Vladimir Putin. Sort of reminds me of Star Wars and Emperor Palpatine, or whatever his name was.

Back in 1982, a different beastly event was unleashed on the world. It was the release of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast. By widening Iron Maiden's audience and helping to bring their brand of British metal to the US, it inspired a generation of metal fans to take up art.

Sure I'd drawn a Van Halen or Twisted Sister sign in sunday school or during a boring math lesson, but the intricate work involved in sketching Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, separated the novices from the die hards. I'd invent band names, album titles, tracklistings, and even complete bios and career trajectories of bands, but the cover art was always very rudimentary if it existed at all. Just like the Kiss logo before it, I knew that you had to use the right fonts when you wrote down a bands name, but actually drawing Eddie was far too complex for me.

I keep thinking of some of those metal kids. Long hair hanging over their faces and blocking their books in study hall so they could keep their head low and nobody can see what they were doing. Sometimes one of them would lift their head up at the end of the period and show you what they sketched. It was pretty amazing, if not a little disturbing. Eddie yielding an ax with Margaret Thatcher clutching at his leg. Eddie coming out of a grave and tearing off his clothes and howling at the stormy sky. Eddie with a chain around his neck, shackled to a prison wall.

They were nice kids. Just a little misunderstood, but weren't we all. They had a certain bond. They were united by metal and they showed it proudly with torn and frayed blue jeans, a black metal shirt with their favorite band on it, and a jean jacket to top it off. Sometimes they kept it simple with pins of their favorite bands on the front. Other times they went all out and put a huge patch of Metallica or Iron Maiden on the back of the jacket. It was a statement. It said "I do not like fake metal. In fact I hate it. Fuck Poison and Bon Jovi". It felt permanent, or as permanent as black metal got in suburbia. Tattoo parlors had yet to find their niche.

Eddie fed the imagination and illustrated Iron Maiden's music in much the same way that Stanley & Tchock's packaging colors Radiohead's music today. And it gave them an identity. As easy as it is to picture some of those kids in one of VH1's Fanatic shows with thousands of pictures of Eddie covering their walls and life size models of Eddie rising from coffins in their living room, the reality is they're probably just like you and me. Accountants, lawyers, dentists, truck drivers and cube occupants.

Although I'd like to think that at least a few of them took up art. I'd like to think that those long hours of sketching Eddie paid off in some way. Maybe I'll have to probe a little bit and ask the next graphic designer I meet what they were listening to when they grew up. If they could navigate through the hair bands in the 80's and find something with substance, they're probably doing it in their careers as well.

Or maybe if the fundamentalists are right about 6/6/06, we'll all be drawing pictures of Vladimir Putin come tomorrow.