STRYPER Murder By Pride

Christian rockers Stryper will be releasing their newest album on July 21st, called Murder By Pride. The band had a "Murder By Pride" artwork contest on their website for fans to submit the potential cover for the upcoming album. The winning artwork, which will be used for the group's new CD, was submitted by Gilvan Rangel of Campina Grande, Brazil. The band says, "Hundreds of submissions were received and carefully reviewed."
Above left is the artwork that Gilvan submitted to the band. The image on the right is the artwork after it was tweeked by the band, and as it is being advertised on sites such as Amazon. The middle image was created by Tobi Elektrik over at Firestream.net, and I think it is a substantial improvement over both the original and tweaked versions. Ever since I saw the original image, I have disliked the face in the image. And I much prefer the zoomed in image of just the body and arms, and the much larger Stryper logo. All in all I think the middle image looks more like an album cover to me than the other two.
I really hope that Stryper will decide to showcase all of the images they received on their official web site, as I would love to see some of the other images that were submitted. If you would like to see two such images, you can check out Death is Gain where the artist has posted two of his submissions.
The official album 'may' have the image to the right on it, but my iTunes copy will happily have the middle image as its cover!