Don Brautigam

Don Brautigam was a cover artist who painted the cover to the original 1980 Signet paperback version of The Stand. The image is mostly black, with the dark blue outline of a face floating over a light blue-lit horizon and two red eyes, one of which intersects with the red of a crow, which is one of the many forms villain Randall Flagg can take. The image would later inspire the cover to author Stephen King's 1989 novel The Dark Half, which similarly intersects bird and human eyes.

His cover won the 1980 Marketing Bestsellers Award for Cover of the Year.

Biography (Before The Stand)
Don Brautigam was born in Paterson, New Jersey on September 12, 1946, and in 1971, he graduated from New York City's School of Visual Arts. Most of his work came as an album cover artist, and he had already contributed several famous covers for James Brown and Herbie Mann at the time Signet asked him to paint the first edition paperback cover for The Stand.

Biography (After The Stand)
The success of his cover for The Stand led to Signet hiring him to design a cover for the 1982 first paperback version of Stephen King's 1978 short story collection Night Shift. Brautigam's eventual design was a blue outer cover with stencils revealing eyes. Upon opening the outer cover, the reader would find a painting of bandages being taken off a hand with eyes peeking out from the fingers and palm. This image was inspired by the collection's story "I Am the Doorway," in which an astronaut finds himself mutated in just that way. It was so striking, it would be reused as a cover for the British-American SF magazine Omni in their "Best of 1982" issue.

Brautigam returned to album art, where his preference for heavy use of blacks made his work perfect for heavy metal covers. His most iconic and famous album cover, and indeed work of art, would prove to be the cover to the 1986 Metallica album Master of Puppets, on which the band's logo stretches out marionette streams to an apparently military cemetery. He also received acclaim for his cover to Mötley Crüe's 1989 album "Dr. Feelgood," which depicts a rather demonic caduceus on a pale green tile background.

He continued painting until January 27, 2008, when he lost his battle with stomach cancer at 63 years old.