The artist who gave Gritty a heavy metal hellscape makeover

Art and death metal entered Jim Anderson’s life at roughly the same time. The Massachusetts native began listening to bands like Cannibal Corpse at age 13. (“Basically, any music I could play to piss my mom off,” he clarifies.) He’d started sketching and making collages by the time he finished high school.

The two passions didn’t converge until his college years at Bridgewater State University, where he studied graphic design and found himself dreading a future spent crafting marketing materials.

“I realized that I didn’t want to work doing bland designs for a pharmaceutical company,” recalls Anderson, 35. “I would go nuts. So I started incorporating more death metal [imagery] and making stuff for myself.”

Since moving to Philly from Boston in 2010, Anderson, under the name GRIMGRIMGRIM, has become the city’s go-to flier and poster designer for death metal and hardcore shows. Last month, at Kung Fu Necktie, he set up a small table near the bar to sell his poster for that night’s show featuring Japan’s Kruelty and Outer Heaven from rural Pennsylvania.

Even more eye-catching than his skull, snake, and demon-covered poster design were the fliers, T-shirts, and stickers that shared his merch table. Anderson has taken to his adopted hometown’s eccentricities with a convert’s zeal, and those familiar elements fuse with violent, gory death metal symbolism, and an anarchic design partially inspired by Czech surrealism.

In one print the Phillie Phanatic is garbed like the grim reaper, ribs exposed, and wielding a barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat (a nod to the Philly-born Extreme Championship Wrestling) over the motto, “Death Awaits.” A mock ad for “Grim’s Steaks” twists the Geno’s logo to tout a “666 foot steak and cigarette smoothie.” A blood-dripping Wawa T-shirt boasts the slogan “I Shall Die Here.”

Anderson first expressed his cynical and savage take on Philadelphia nearly a decade ago, when he began experimenting with screen printing. He designed a poster reading “Can’t Get To Heaven on the Frankford El” from the lyrics of the 1970 song by the American Dream and featuring the cartoonish, corpse-painted face that has become GRIMGRIMGRIM’s icon.

He followed that with a few images playing with the Phanatic, but then dropped the idea. “And then,” he explains, “Gritty came around.”

The bizarre Flyers mascot has become central to Anderson’s art, Gritty’s manic grin and psychotic stare fitting perfectly with his heavy metal hellscapes. The GRIMGRIMGRIM online store currently features an orange and black hockey jersey (#666, naturally) with Gritty’s face looming over a guillotine.

“Seeing your typical Philly sports fan wearing a shirt with a death metal logo and a guillotine on it is always funny to me,” Anderson said with a laugh.

His designs started to go viral following Donald Trump’s infamous claim that “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” which Anderson illustrated with a bat-winged, Molotov cocktail-wielding Gritty. Since then he’s created popular designs in the wake of last summer’s confused response to the Delaware River chemical spill (“I survived the Philadelphia Wooder Wars of 2023″) and the smoke-filled air resulting from the Canadian wildfires (”Philadelphia Death Smog 5K”).

Not everyone is a fan. The NFL objected to Anderson’s repurposing of the Eagles mascot, leading to a temporary suspension of his Instagram account, while SEPTA sent him a cease and desist letter over his parody of their “We’re Getting There” slogan as “We’re All Going To Die.”

In the wake of June’s I-95 bridge collapse, Anderson and designer Ralph “Pinkbikeralph” Stollenwerk rushed out a conspiracy theory-laden T-shirt claiming “Hoagie oil can’t melt steel beams” and “Mayor Jimbo Did I-95.” They regretted this once it was revealed that the truck driver involved was killed in the accident and pledged that proceeds from remaining stock would go to the driver’s family.

Anderson is now preparing for a move that will take him out of Philadelphia into New Jersey, though he doesn’t anticipate that his new “right over the bridge” home will lead to the same kind of inspiration.

“I’ve been here for a good chunk of my life now,” Anderson says of his fascination with Philly iconography. “I know there are probably people that live here who think, ‘Oh, this guy’s still a transplant.’ But dude, my teeth are falling out. I’ve got a terrible tattoo. What more do you want?”

Jim Anderson’s work can be found online at grimgrimgrim.com.