Just discovered this set of postcards from the Japanese death/gore metal artist Toshihiro Egawa, and I couldn't pass 'em up. Released in a limited run by the Tokyo-based extreme art gallery Galeria De Muerte, the Invitation Of Death Metal postcard set was a commemorative item printed in conjunction with Egawa's solo art exhibition of the same name that was hosted by the Galeria in 2007. I've always thought of Egawa as sort of a Japanese answer to legendary British illustrator Dan Seagrave, who was responsible for some of the greatest death/grind album covers ever; Egawa's richly detailed and nightmarish paintings have a similar feel as Seagraves when he works with color, and his black and white work is comparable to the spiky monstrosities of the Riddick Brothers. Egawa has ultimately created his own unique style though, and is one of the most highly skilled illustrators working within the death metal field right now; I'd kill to see a book of his collected work, if one were ever to be published.

The six postcards that are included in this set feature his album art taken from releases by Purulent Infection, Devourment, Partisan Turbine, Vomit Remnants, Impure, and Pyrexia; some are small-scale reproductions, others fill up the entire card. All look fantastic, though, with high quality paintings of pestilent, slavering corpse-beasts, demonic maggots, apocalyptic landscapes, triptychs of nightmarish skulls puking rivers of semen-like ooze over clusters of defleshed skulls, inter-dimensional tomb-cities, and fantastic Boschian scenes of hellish industry. Perfect for scrawling out a death threat, apocalyptic prophecy, or a note to your girlfriend while travelling in Thailand.