With an extra pair of fangs poking through bloody gums, battered metallic battledress, copious bloodstaining and an arsenal of weaponry at hand, Senjutsu is Eddie at his most flat-out bloodthirsty, shit-scary. No wonder the box set also included a seventeen-inch poster of the image. However, in the Senjutsu Super Deluxe edition, the Blu-Ray cover of the epic Writing On The Wall animated video adds a giant Samurai Eddie flashing his great big sword, as well as the rest of the Biker Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There are few more metal images than the Grim Reaper on a motorbike surrounded by flying eagles. Bursting through a copy of the Mirror carrying the tragic news of the R101 disaster (the subject of the song), Eddie reaches to grab the stricken airship out of the clouds, as the vast shadow of long-time Maiden sleeve art cameo the Grim Reaper surveys his grim handiwork.

His mane of neon green fibre-optic hair is pretty fetching, too.Įddie’s first head-and-shoulders cover portrait since 1980, Mark Wilkinson’s Mayan Ed for The Book Of Souls is a focused triumph, our tribal-scarred hero peering out of a jet-black background, leaving behind the cluttered tableaux of recent years to reassert the snarling menace and attitude that first made us fall in love with the mad old bastard.įor a limited Record Store Day picture disc gatefold, Maiden turned to Hervé Monjeaud, the French artist who redesigned Derek Riggs’ Maiden England video sleeve for its 2013 DVD reissue, for the Empire Of The Clouds release. Being sucked into a computer universe seemingly works wonders on our hero’s teeth, displaying a straighter and whiter set of gnashers here than we’ve ever seen in Eddie’s ‘ead before. You just can't keep a good Eddie down.(Image credit: Iron Maiden) Speed Of Lightįor Speed Of Light, the first single from Maiden’s sixteenth studio album, Eddie was reimagined as a digi-hopping game invader, popping up in all manner of classic era video game archetypes as he battled his way through til the bitter end.

Keep your eyes open - the original paintings often turn up on eBay for sale. They lost quite a few of them over the years. 'Maiden might still have the original,' he says, 'although I think it's one of the Eddies that escaped their clutches. Sadly, Riggs' original Killers painting may have been lost to posterity. We used so much stuff trying to kill them off that I ended up getting pesticide poisoning.' 'It was a bit rundown in those days and it had cockroaches all over the place. 'The buildings in the background are actually the block of apartments that I lived in at that time in North London called Etchingham Court,' he explains. The original Killers painting, done in a type of watercolor called designer's gauche, was 12-and-a-half inches square, and took Riggs about a week to paint. Eddie was not 'developed,' Eddie is just there.' But really, it's just me making it up as I go along. His hair got a bit Farrah Fawcett, but that was OK back then, because there was this kind of fashion for big fluffy hair with rock bands, so people didn't really notice.

Eddie has an ax because he's an 'axman' - it's a pun on the term for a rock-and-roll guitarist. I fill up the space and then start putting things into it. 'But I never sat down and said 'Now I am going to make him look this way or that way.' I'm very spontaneous when I create a picture - sometimes I don't even use a sketch to begin with. 'The Killers picture was done about three years after the first one was painted,' he says. With a fuller head of hair, a sinister grin, and a bloody hatchet in hand, the new Eddie could well be seen as a portent of the group's impending split with then-singer Paul Di'Anno (he would be given 'the ax' before the year was out) and his subsequent replacement with much longer-locked (at the time) frontman Bruce Dickinson.ĭespite the marked difference between the original Eddie and his Killers successor, Riggs says the character's development was not a conscious process. But while the Eddie that appeared on Iron Maiden looked frazzled and vacant, the character that graced Killers was vicious and self-possessed. (Riggs would go on to do all of Maiden's covers for the next 20 years and recently put out the book Run For Cover: The Art Of Derek Riggs). In 1981, New Wave Of British Heavy Metal legends Iron Maiden released their second album, Killers, featuring such perennial classics as 'Wrathchild' and 'Murders in the Rue Morgue.' Artist Derek Riggs had already created the infamous 'Eddie' mascot that appears on the cover of the band's self-titled 1980 debut - a painting he actually did a year before Maiden even existed - so it was only natural for him to get the nod for Killers, as well.

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