Struggling to come up with a new topic for this edition's comedy essay, our minds wandered back to our Worst Metal Album Covers features. But we'd already done that twice. What if there were no more bad metal album covers? ...What were we thinking?

His bass matches the color of the vibrator he just bought you.

Recognize the background? That's because it was the backdrop for your high school picture. In high school, Randy tried to funk lots of girls, but he was too tender from practicing slap all day. He also played bass. (KAPOW!) Not surprisingly, Randy played with fellow wank-master Steve Vai in a band called Morning Thunder, who shortly after became Morning Wood. (Probably. We're not checking.) Then he joined Orpheus, a "Canadian fusion band"--three worse words have never been strung together--who shortly changed their name to Orifice. (Again, we're not checking.)

Throg the Deathrider burns down Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood of Make Believe.

Here's how we imagine the conversation between the band and their penny pinching manager went when they saw the album art:

Battlaxe: Vito! This cover is awful!

Manager: Whaddaya talkin' about? It's got fire. A motorcycle. I even made 'em draw them barbarian boots on the guy.

Battleaxe: It looks like a child drew it!

Manager: No sh*t Sherlock. My kid Vito Jr. did. Cost me a Transformer--which I'm takin' outta your advance.

Battleaxe: Oh. Well.... we're just afraid it'll make us look amateurish.

Manager: You're called Battleaxe. Whaddaya want, a f*ckin' Matisse??

And with that the argument was settled.

Maurice Sendak's lesser talented brother, Arnold, also drew.

This might seem like an inexplicably awful record cover, but it's actually the fault of the record company, who censored the original title, The Boy Who Cried Retarded Wolf. See, it all makes sense? ...Ok, no, no it doesn't. Apparently, the cover was drawn by a famous Swedish illustrator in his 80s, about whom the band's bassist said: "We told him to do his thing. When you deal with artists it is better to let them do it all." Not when he's a cranky old man who hates your music.

"Narita" is Japanese for "nonsense".

You know how God works in mysterious ways? Riot works in mysterious-er ways. The best God could do was a duckbilled platypus. Riot stuck the head of a seal on the body of a sunburned sumo wrestler and gave it an axe. F*ck you God. Our only guess is that Riot was simply throwing artistic darts at the wall to see if they could hit on something that jibed with Japan's unfathomable culture, where this...