Eddie, whose full name is Eddie the 'Edd or Edward the Head also known as Edward the Great (see below), is the mascot for the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden. He is a perennial fixture in the often violent album cover art, as well as ever present in their live shows. Eddie was also featured in a first-person shooter video game, Ed Hunter, and as an unlockable character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

He is also the mascot of the Força Jovem (Portuguese: Young Force) an Organized Fan Club of the Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama - a Brazilian soccer team. The very first version of the mask was made by art student David Brown - then at East Ham Technical College. He lived next door to Dave (lights) Beazley and gave him two or three masks that he'd made.

It was vacuum formed plastic, made from a plaster cast of the face of another student. By over-heating the plastic before forming the mask it created holes and blisters and looked like a "plague mask". The character Eddie was created by Derek Riggs.

In the artwork to the single "Running Free", a silhouette of a large, skinny zombie-like creature can be seen. When the band was looking through potential artwork for their first album, they came across the artwork by Derek Riggs that would eventually become the artwork for the self-titled album. The band liked it, and felt that it was what the silhouette actually looked like.

The artwork for the second album, Killers, was also an original Riggs painting before he started creating bespoke album covers from The Number of the Beast onwards. Derek Riggs claimed - in the Maiden documentary 12 Wasted Years - that the design for Eddie the cartoon was based on what was supposedly a Japanese headhe saw on a television documentary, hanging on the side of a burned out Japanese tank at the Matanikau River during the Battle for Henderson Field, October 24, 1942.

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