The mascot is inherited from heavy metal and thrash used it differently. Iron Maiden's Eddie is a character with a life of his own; Megadeth's Vic Rattlehead is a political cartoon with a job to do. That difference is the whole subject.
What follows is who had one, what it was for, and why the mascot tradition mostly died out at exactly the point the genre got serious about itself.
Vic Rattlehead
The best of them, drawn by Ed Repka and present on Megadeth sleeves from the first album onwards. A skull with its eyes clamped shut, its ears plugged and its mouth wired closed: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, rendered as a corpse.
What makes him work is that he is an argument rather than a monster. The band's subject matter is the arms trade, censorship, institutions and complicity, and Vic is a one image summary of it. On Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? he stands in front of a ruined United Nations building, which is a political cartoon executed in airbrush.
Overkill's Chaly
A winged green skull with bat wings, on every Overkill sleeve for forty years, and one of the most consistent visual identities in metal. Chaly does not tell a story or make an argument; he is a badge, and the fact that he has been on twenty consecutive albums is the point.
Sodom's Knarrenheinz
A soldier in a gas mask, and the most content appropriate mascot in the genre. Sodom write about war, specifically and repeatedly, and their mascot is a rendering of what a soldier looks like when nobody is pretending he is heroic. He arrived on Persecution Mania and has been there since.
The others
Anthrax had the Not Man, a cartoon figure that fitted the band's refusal to be humourless and is closer to a comic character than to a monster. Nuclear Assault, Tankard and several German bands had recurring figures that were never quite formalised. Iron Maiden's Eddie, from outside the genre, is the template every one of them is reacting to.
| Mascot | Band | First appeared | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vic Rattlehead | Megadeth | 1985 | A political argument in one image |
| Chaly | Overkill | 1985 | A badge, unchanged for forty years |
| The Not Man | Anthrax | 1987 | Permission to be funny |
| Knarrenheinz | Sodom | 1987 | What the lyrics are actually about |
| Eddie | Iron Maiden | 1980 | The template, from outside |
What a mascot is for
Three jobs, in descending order of importance.
Recognition on the rack. A record with a recurring figure on it is identifiable at a distance by somebody who cannot read the logo yet, and in 1986 that was worth a great deal.
Continuity. A band whose sound changes across a decade can be held together visually by a figure that does not, which is why the mascot bands have unusually coherent looking discographies.
And merchandise, which is the one nobody said out loud in 1986 and which now pays several of these bands' bills. A mascot is a design that works on a shirt without the band's name on it at all.
Why thrash mostly stopped
Because the genre got serious about itself, and a mascot is a slightly childish device that sits awkwardly next to an album about the arms race.
The bands who kept theirs are the ones whose identity could carry it: Megadeth, because Vic is an argument; Overkill, because Chaly is a badge and Overkill have never pretended to be anything but a metal band; Sodom, because Knarrenheinz is not a joke. The bands who dropped the idea, or never took it up, are mostly the ones who wanted to be taken seriously as writers.
Death metal then abandoned mascots almost entirely in favour of illegible logos and photographic gore, and by 1993 the device belonged to an older tradition. The modern revival has picked it back up, cheerfully and without embarrassment, which is consistent with everything else that generation has done with the genre's furniture.
Where the mascot ends and a band's whole visual identity begins is largely a question about the logo: the boundary cases raise the same problem in a different form. The full map is in the bands you need to know.
The artists behind them
Two names cover most of what these figures look like. Ed Repka drew Vic Rattlehead and a substantial part of the American genre's visual identity, in an airbrushed high colour style that is instantly datable and has been consciously revived by the modern bands. Andreas Marschall gave the German scene its look, including Knarrenheinz, in a considerably more precise and less cartoonish register.
Both were working fast and cheap, out of a recording budget that had usually already run out, and neither was designing a brand in any sense they would have recognised. That the figures have lasted forty years and now sell more merchandise than the records ever did is a joke at the expense of everybody who has since paid an agency to do the same job.
What the modern bands do with them
The revival brought the mascot back deliberately and without embarrassment, which is consistent with how that generation has treated all of this genre's furniture.
Municipal Waste have a recurring visual world of nuclear accidents and party disasters. Several modern bands have commissioned Ed Repka directly, which is a stated argument about what kind of record they have made. Others use the device ironically, which mostly does not work: a mascot is a badge, and a badge worn ironically is just a picture.
The ones that succeed are the ones doing what Overkill did, which is to pick a figure and then simply never change it. Consistency is the whole mechanism, and it is the one thing irony cannot supply.
Sources and notes
First appearances refer to studio album sleeves rather than to demos or shirts. Attributions of design follow the credits on original pressings.
