Description

MF DOOM spent his career hiding behind a metal mask, and the cover of Madvillainy put that mask in close-up. Photographer Eric Coleman shot DOOM at the Stones Throw house in Los Angeles, and the label's art director Jeff Jank turned the picture into a grainy black-and-white square. The mask fills the frame, its cold metal catching the light, while the man behind it stays unreadable.

Jank wanted a picture of the person and not just the prop. "I really wanted to get a shot of him on the cover, just to make a definitive 'Doom cover'," he said. He drew on the cover of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, and only after finishing noticed that his design also resembled Madonna's debut album. He kept it anyway and called the result the "rap version of Beauty and the Beast."

The last touch was a small orange square in the top right corner, added because the artwork "needed something distinctive," Jank said, comparing it to the orange letter on that Madonna sleeve. Released on 23 March 2004, the album became a cult classic and the cover became an icon. Marvel paid tribute in 2015 with a variant cover of The Mighty Thor showing Jane Foster behind the mask, with Thor's hammer in an orange square.

Credit

Photography by Eric Coleman; design by Jeff Jank