Forty years after hitting record stores, Z2 gives fans and readers another take on Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind album with a supergroup’s worth of comics talent paying homage to this classic. But does Maiden’s particular brand of heavy metal live a successful still life on these printed pages, or does this hardcover collection die with its boots on?
Cover by Dan MumfordWritten by Steven Grant, Bruce Dickinson & Tony Lee, Ivan Brandon, Sacha Servasi, Antony Johnston, Leah Moore & John Reppion, Brian Posehn, Chris Roberson, Alison Sampson
Illustrated by Carson Thorne & DC Alonso, Damien Worm, Francesco Dossema & Heather Moore, Christian Rosado & DC Alonso, Staz Johnson & DC Alonso, John Pearson, Michael Avon Oeming & Taki Soma, Danijel Žeželj & DC Alonso, Alison Sampson
Chapter Illustrations by Montos, Nat Jones, Carin Hazmat, Steve Chanks, Travis Knight, Rantz Hoseley, Jan Meininghaus, Jay Geldhof, Kyle Hotz & Dan Brown
Lettered by Troy Peteri
Published by Z2 Comics
40 years have passed since the release of Piece of Mind. More than an album, it was a thunderous statement of intent by a band whose meteoric rise from the East End of London would propel them to the world stage, thrusting them into the realms of legend. This commemorative tome, containing comics, art, and remembrances from acclaimed writers, artists, musicians and storytellers, is a powerful celebration of the unparalleled vision which inspired them — the living legend that is Iron Maiden.
A brief mention of my Maiden bonafides before we go any further: I was introduced to the band by way of my older brothers at an impressionable age where my music-purchasing autonomy was limited. So while I have The Number of the Beast and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son burned into my brain, I am much less familiar with albums like this one or Somewhere in Time, aside from worshipping Derek Riggs’ cover paintings the way I did Byrne’s X-Men or Simonson’s Thor. More on Derek later. Off Piece of Mind, I knew “Flight of Icarus” and “Die With Your Boots On” and “The Trooper” and “Where Eagles Dare” from sibling mixed tapes, but the rest of the album was almost a blank slate to me before going into this review.
Books like this, of which Z2 has published many and show no signs of stopping, have to walk a knife’s edge to be successful. They need to feel like “paper videos” for the Piece of Mind tracks, yet standalone enough from the source material to be enjoyed without prior knowledge of the album. Is it likely non-Maiden fans will buy a $40 hardcover collection just based on the fact its inspiration is a 40-year-old New Wave of British Heavy Metal classic? Probably not. But while the core audience for this book will undoubtedly be familiar with songs like “Where Eagles Dare”, “To Tame A Land”, and “Still Life”, Z2 has done their usual job of making it enough of an attractive art object to draw in a wider audience. What are readers going to find when they crack open the book? A pretty decent comics horror anthology, to be honest.
It’s interesting to see a collection of Iron Maiden adaptations in another medium, when Maiden themselves have always been keen on adapting other works into their heavy metal lexicon. This book alone gives us stories inspired by songs themselves inspired by such films and books as the 1968 Richard Burton / Clint Eastwood war film Where Eagles Dare, Yukio Mishima’s “Sun and Steel” essay about samurai Miyamoto Musashi from the same year, horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s “The Inhabitant of the Lake” for “Still Life”, Alfred Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” for “The Trooper”, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire, and more.
One more adaptation deserves mentioning, as it might also be my favorite of the book: Alison Sampson’s take on “To Tame A Land”. The song references Frank Herbert’s Dune rather extensively (points on writer/bassist Steve Harris and singer Bruce Dickinson for not only including “kwizazt haderach” and “mua’dib” but making them actually fit). There are even some pressings of Piece of Mind with this song listed as “Dune”, until author Frank Herbert specifically send out legions of Sardaukar lawyers to force the name change. Legend has it the band was informed by said lawyers, “Frank Herbert doesn’t like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden”.
Continued below“To Tame A Land” the song still name-checks Dune plot points quite extensively, in a manner I’m assuming covered under the same law that let DC Comics publish comics WITH the Billy Batson Captain Marvel so long as they didn’t published a book CALLED Captain Marvel. But Sampson’s comic goes in the opposite direction, giving readers a wordless story about the effect of the novel itself. The land transformed is no longer Arrakis, but rather the imagination of the book’s readers. Her art marries the story with the feel and tone of 1970’s lineart & painted sci-fi paperback covers that just works incredibly well.
None of the other stories in Piece of Mind go quite that far afield from their musical inspirations, but they all manage to bring something more to their namesakes than just illustrating lyric boxes. For example, “Where Eagles Dare” gives readers a daring WWII mission in 6 pages without it being a Cliff Notes version of the Eastwood film. It does a good job balancing 2nd person narrative captions with dialogue in a small amount of pages (the shortest of the whole book) to make the story feel bigger than it actually is, while keeping the mood appropriately somber.
Troopers, soldiers, and warriors actually make up most of the protagonists for these stories. And while that type of shared subject matter can make songs blend together when played by the same band and sung by the same vocalist, one of the benefits of a book like Piece of Mind is each story getting a different creative team means Christian Rosado’s “Die With Your Boots On” and Staz Johnson’s “The Trooper” and Danijel Žeželj’s “Sun and Steel” stand apart much easier in printed form than audio.
This benefit grows when you think about pacing and tone. Piece the album, despite its varied inspirations, is still a heavy metal album. And coming from Iron Maiden, that means powerful vocals, laser-precise guitars, driving bass & drums… the works. One does not headbang to Zamfir. Which is not to say the album’s approach is all hammer, no scalpel; that’s not the case at all. But Piece the comic can give the material more tonal and/or pacing variety than the songs themselves can. Take “Sun and Steel” for instance; Roberson and Žeželj’s contemplative take on the song give it much more room to breath and allow reflection than Maiden’s galloping attack. Same with Moore/Reppion/Pearson on “Still Life”. And in the case of Posehn & Oeming’s “Quest for Fire”, the comic injects the subject matter with just enough of the comedian’s rock wit to elevate the artist’s devil-horns-inducing take on primitive man’s early interactions. Take that, Kubrick!
The main criticism I have with the book, and ‘criticism’ is probably too strong a word, is the lack of Derek Riggs involvement. He’s mentioned in Rod Smallwood’s introduction along with a few of his cover paintings, as well as being namechecked in signature by Jason Edminton for his “Asylum” edition cover. And I know although Riggs was their go-to album cover artist for their early career, he hasn’t done a Maiden cover in decades. But for a band that has such a distinct visual identity, especially for the period this material is pulled from, it would have been nice to see at least a preface or something from him, if not a new illustration. Why have Edminton essentially redo the album cover when you could have him do a different subject and use the Riggs cover? Or have Riggs update that cover?
Beyond that, Piece of Mind the OGN is another solid musi-comic release from the folks at Z2. From the comics themselves, to the chapter illustrations (aka singles covers), to even Scott Ian’s fan-letter afterword . . . this is a book that every Maiden fan should be lucky enough to have on their shelf, comics fan or not.
Up the Irons!
