Metal Maniac Master Illustrators
Published on May 5, 2018 in Art & Artists
There are three artists that seem to dominate the heavy metal album cover landscape (I know I have several of them in my collection.): Ed Repka, Dan Seagrave, and Joe Petagno.
Ed Repka is an American artist, best known for creating album covers for metal bands as well as shirt designs, including those featuring Megadeth’s mascot Vic Rattlehead. Repka’s portfolio also includes Dark Angel’s logo and model designs for the Hellraiser films. In the 1980’s, he became known as the King of Thrash Metal Art. Some of my favorite album covers include Death’s Leprosy (1988), Merciless Death’s Evil in the Night (2006), and the upcoming Twisted Prayers by Gruesome.
Dan Seagrave is a self-taught painter, who has created many record covers for death metal bands, especially in the early 1990’s. His work is typically highly detailed, and he also works on mural designs and sells his art as posters. Some of my favorite covers include Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness (1989), Entombed’s Left Hand Path (1990), and Dismember’s The God That Never Was (2004). He has a massive amount of work on his website.
Joe Petagno is an American artist known principally for creating images used on rock album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, Sweet, Motörhead, Roy Harper, Marduk, Bal-Sagoth, Autopsy, Attick Demons, Illdisposed and Sodom.
After meeting Motörhead’s Lemmy in 1975, he designed “War-Pig” (a.k.a. Snaggletooth, The Iron Boar, The Bastard or The Little Bastard) for the band’s Motörhead album and has continued to design the majority of the album and single sleeve covers for the band. Petagno refers to Motörhead’s mascot as The Bastard (or The Little Bastard). Joe came up with the concept after studying skulls of wild boars, gorillas and dogs.
Some of my favorite covers include Angelcorpse’s The Inexorable (1999), Motörhead’s Inferno (2004), and Vader’s Tibi Et Igni (2014).
