A horned, grinning executioner swinging an axe at the front of GWAR's stage was, for more than a decade, Chuck Varga: the man who sculpted the mask, wrote the character, and then put it on himself. Varga, a founding member of the Richmond, Virginia shock-rock band and co-founder of its Slave Pit Studios workshop, died on September 25, 2026. He was 68.

Varga studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University in the early 1980s, and what he found waiting for him after graduation frustrated him. "We were not happy with what they said was art," he told Decibel magazine, "and we were not happy with what was passed off as music ... It was a total artificial construct by MTV and big corporations." GWAR grew out of that frustration: a circle of Richmond artists, among them Varga, Dave Brockie, Hunter Jackson and Don Drakulich, who turned a shared studio into a touring stage act built on monster costumes rather than club-band conventions. Varga moved to Richmond in 1985 and became a co-founder of Slave Pit Studios, the workshop that built GWAR's costumes and creatures, according to GWAR; by 1987 the collective had settled into a dedicated space across the street from the underground club Rockitz. He summed up his own role simply: he was "one part performer, one part designer and one part sculptor," the band wrote in an April 2026 tribute, its account of his work describing an "eye-popping" aesthetic that fused pulp science fiction, underground comics and dark humor into practical effects built for the stage.

Inside Slave Pit, Varga created and performed the character of the Sexecutioner, contributing costumes, sets, props and comic-book artwork to what the band's own history calls eight major touring productions and more than a thousand live shows across the United States and Europe, including stints on GWAR's earliest albums such as 1990's "Scumdogs of the Universe." He co-authored two of the band's feature-length films, among them 1992's "Phallus in Wonderland," which earned GWAR a nomination for Best Long Form Music Video at the 1993 Grammy Awards, according to the Recording Academy. The band, its monsters still largely Varga's designs, picked up a second Grammy nomination in 1996, for Best Metal Performance. "We're making history here," Varga said of the band's early ambitions. "We're giving the music industry a much-needed kick in the pants."

In 1997 Varga left Richmond for New York, trading the Sexecutioner's mask for steady work as a scenic artist and special-effects designer on Broadway and in film and television. Two years earlier he had partnered with Drakulich to launch Hyperreal Productions, an effects studio that built public sculpture and collectible figures for clients beyond the band. In New York's outsider-art circles he became friendly with painters Joe Coleman and Robert Williams, and he kept a fine-art practice running alongside his commercial work for the rest of his life. He returned to GWAR's stage periodically in the years that followed, including a 2012 run that he later said "felt like I'd never left." He performed with the band for the last time at its Halloween Scumdog Reunion show in 2021.

New York also brought Varga to Coney Island, where he met performer Bambi the Mermaid at the neighborhood's Mermaid Parade. They married there in 2017. He folded his taste for spectacle into her Neo-burlesque shows and became a fixture at the nonprofit arts organization Coney Island USA, where he took the stage role of resident Neptune, continuing to build sculpture and perform in underground theater alongside her long after he had stopped touring with GWAR.

Bandmate Casey Orr, who performs as Beefcake the Mighty, announced Varga's death, writing that he "passed peacefully, his beloved wife Bambi holding his hand," and that he "was one of a kind. As an artist, as a performer; as a scholar and a gentleman," according to NextMosh. Fellow Slave Pit artist Bob Gorman, who performs as Bonesnapper, said Varga's "over-the-top underground art aesthetic helped define an entire universe and inspired generations of artists and fans around the world," according to GWAR. Varga is survived by his wife, Bambi.

The Sexecutioner's mask Varga sculpted is still recognizable to fans who never saw him wear it, reproduced on shirts, patches and album art long after he stepped out of the suit. "Phallus in Wonderland," the film he helped write and build, remains the closest thing GWAR has to a Grammy trophy. Slave Pit Studios, the Richmond workshop he helped build in the mid-1980s, still shapes the creatures that walk onto GWAR's stage, and the Coney Island stages where he played resident Neptune still carry the mix of spectacle and craft he brought to them, two coasts and four decades apart.