In 1985, Heartland created a series of Monster Toys, palm-sized rubber faces which could be distorted into many grimaces, simply by placing your fingers into the back of the toy.
There were four to collect, each more hideous than the last. Some toy historians say they came with an animatronic body which held a red, glowing axe and moved around to the strains of When the Saints Go Marching In, much to the annoyance of anyone in close proximity. It was a different time.
Heartland had also created an iconic thrash metal mascot, quite by accident.
Following the release of Spreading the Disease, which emerged in the same year as Monster Toys, Anthrax had their own gurning anti-hero; a moustachioed maniac would appear on their tour shirts. He’d later appear on album and single artwork, too, as well get inked into drummer Charlie Benante‘s upper left arm.
“I remember one day we were in a store in Boston, and we see the little doll,” singer Joey Belladonna recalled during a 1988 interview. “You ever seen the thing before? And then Island records had put a thing out on Spreading The Disease that said ‘By George, I think he’s got it’; it was his face and we figured we’d have him along with us basically. Nothing really big, he just happened to be around us. He’ll be in the new video!”
“You could buy it at any novelty store,” remembers Scott Ian. “We all thought it was cool. Nobody tried to name him. He just became the Not Man.”
But why ‘Not Man’? And not something similar to Murray, like Dio’s demon pal?
“I knew this kid, Alan Luckman, and he used to say it all the time in about ’74, ’75. And that’s what made me say it,” Ian told Guitar World in 1993. “That’s how it became Scott Not and all that kind of crap.”
The artwork for Anthrax’s 1988 album State of Euphoria (Image credit: Island Records)
Metal mascots were largely serious brand extensions of globally successful bands. Iron Maiden had Eddie, Megadeth had Vic Rattlehead, while Dio had the evil-sounding demon Murray.
The Not Man was a case of the band planting their tongue firmly in their cheek. After all, the band were wearing Bermuda shorts, recording rap singles and employing legendary MAD magazine illustrator Mort Drucker to draw their new mascot cradling the band on the back of their 1988 album State of Euphoria.
International versions of their single Antisocial depicted the Not Man spray painting a wall. In the accompanying video, their drum tech John Tempesta (who’d go on to join Exodus, Testament, White Zombie, The Cult and Helmet) wore a big papier-mâché head and enthusiastically high-fiving the crowd. As a joke, the head was removed at the end of the video to show it was a legendary vocalist was under there all along. Spoiler: he wasn’t, really.
“We got Ozzy to wear the Not Man head,” laughs Ian, still seemingly in disbelief decades later. “He agreed to do that! Ozzy was stoked. It’s hard to explain how stuff like that felt because it was unbelievable.”
While Not Man has made fleeting appearances over the years, he has remained an iconic part of Anthrax’s visual history. He appeared in the band’s 2021 graphic novel Among the Living, and in 2023, a zombified version also featured in Iron Maiden’s mobile game Legacy of the Beast.
“We couldn’t be happier to be featured in this game,” read a statement from the band. “When the idea came up, we were completely taken aback by it, like, ‘are you serious?’ You have Eddie, one of the greatest mascots of all time, and the Not-Man!”
In coming months, the band will publish their forthcoming book NOT: The Illustrated Oral History Of Anthrax through Z2 comics, and is heavily featured in early glimpses of the artwork, including a very cheeky parody of the DC Comics one-shot Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and John Higgins.
