Staying on track

As is my way, I've decided to start a bunch of new modelling projects before the other fifty are finished. Over the next few months I've planned to make a selection of old, beaten-up vehicles for my Imperial hive city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda.

Actually, 'plan' is too strong a word, as, on that front, I'm probably a lot more like Heath Ledger's Joker than Christian Bale's Batman.

"I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it!"

But with a little luck, in the coming weeks, some of those chased cars (and perhaps other vehicles, both wheeled and tracked) will be prepped, painted and posted here.

So with that in mind, it was pure luck that while visiting a friend last week, I happened to walk past a small enclosure full of rusty, old tractors.

I particularly like the way the first machine has oxidised heavily on its (now unused) tracks, but the rust gradually fades further up the vehicle, revealing the original paint job, before getting thicker again near the top. It looks to me like the rust is at its severest in places on the vehicle most exposed to, or most likely to trap, water. Also worth noting is how the (presumably heavily oiled) piston in the bottom picture has sustained no visible damage whatsoever, whilst the rest of the vehicle is completely battered.

Although I'm intending to vary the degrees of abuse I add to my vehicles, these pics are pretty close to the kind of thing I've got in mind.

Therefore if everything goes according to those plans I'm unable to make, look out for at least some of this deterioration appearing in my forthcoming projects.

Dredd. Judge, jury and executioner... But isn't there something missing?

In the established Judge Dredd comic mythos, the titular character and all his fellow Judges are part of the Mega-City One Justice Department. An all-encompassing government body that runs law enforcement, homeland security, foreign affairs, and pretty much anything of note pertaining to the future East Coast of North America.

International peacekeeper Dredd from Regime Change, with art by Eva De La Cruz

But the story wasn't originally conceived with such an expansive Justice Department.

Back when the strip first launched it carried the tagline 'lawman of the future', yet for anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with it, they will also have heard the phrase 'judge, jury and executioner' used in its context. I can't remember when this was said, or by who, and I've wholeheartedly failed to find any historic reference to it in reprints of the old comics, but I remember growing up in the 70s and 80s and it just kinda… pervading... the stories. I might be wrong, and after sifting through hundreds of pages of reprints looking for it, I'm certainly beginning to doubt myself now, but if there's one thing my childhood anti-hero has taught me, it's stubbornness and the misplaced belief that I am always right. Okay, that's two things, but the point is, I'm going ahead with this post anyway.

So now that I've firmly established that this phrase was part of early Dredd lore, let's look at it a little closer. Judge, jury and executioner. Those three roles, as intimidating as they sound, are all secondary to Dredd's real role. The job he does first and foremost, the one that puts him in constant physical danger, is that of policeman. He's out there looking for crimes to solve and prevent, just like a regular cop. When he's chasing someone down, being shot at, investigating clues and generally doing all that leg work, that's the cop part of his job. Only a tiny percentage of a case will be spent by him weighing up legal options, sentencing perpetrators and, if necessary, carrying out punishment.

This is especially true of the earlier stories

Yet (at least in my recollection) those other three roles were often used to define Dredd. Why is that? Could it be something to do with the original structure of the Justice Department?

It's a rarely discussed fact that in Dredd's early days there was a whole set of background characters that we no longer see. Characters that, when used as a backdrop for Dredd, gave his judicial powers all the more relevance. Back when the strip first launched, Dredd and the Judges weren't the only law in Mega-City One. There was still a regular police department at work in the city.

A Judge is targeted leaving a Police Department in an early story

Dredd was one of only a handful of elite cops with those extra powers of judge, jury and executioner. He and the other judges were called in when a situation became too much for the regular police to handle.

Commuter robots prove too tough for the police in an early Dredd epic

So perhaps 'cop' was left off that job description because he was surrounded by cops. Because being a police officer was the entry-level criteria for him and all his associates. It was the attributes of judge, jury and executioner that stood him apart, not just in the eyes of his readers, but also, crucially, in the eyes of the other characters in the story. Both citizens and police alike would see him as an elite specialist.

If the original set-up were as it is today, where all police work is done by Judges, then Dredd's early contemporaries wouldn't have been quite so in awe of him. There would have been less to stand him apart. He's just another Judge. Another member of the ubiquitous police force. Granted, he's particularly tough and resolute, but then he represents a system which relies on being tough and resolute. Whereas back at the beginning, by being a special cop among regular cops, everyone got the juxtaposition that highlighted Dredd's distinct credentials. His judicial status ranked him apart from his regular police contemporaries.

But the strip started to change fairly quickly. Instead of Police Department buildings we got Sector Houses, and it wasn't long before regular cops had simply disappeared altogether. The Justice Department grew and grew, eating up functionality, from pathology, to technological research, weapons development, military conquest and nearly all aspects of running a state (and its colonies) in the 22nd Century.

Colony Judges take a hit in The Corps, drawn by Paul Marshall & Donnie Cox

The role of the Judges expanded from being a kind of SWAT team on steroids, to the institution we see in stories today, more like an unelected, quasi-fascistic government. The original role of Judges, as a crack squad of beat cops with special powers, became a department, the Street Judges, within the greater organisation.

But they never lost their relevance.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that a system that encompasses nearly all governmental activities would routinely employ at least a few career politicians, but in Dredd's world this does not seem to be the case. The early veneration for the original frontline Judges has remained. Thus most (but not all) of the successful Chief Judges have cut their teeth through at least some work on the beat; cadets failing aspects of their training will probably be barred from the ranks of Street Judges but may still have opportunities to enlist in other departments; and being moved from the Street Judges to another department is often seen as a demotion.

Judge Castillo explains why she's no longer on the streets, with art by the iconic Carlos Ezquerra

So, although the Judges are now so much more than they were at the beginning, the role of a Street Judge - a cop combined with judge, jury and executioner - still has resonance today. Not just to us, the readers, but to the in-story characters as well.

That is, of course, provided judge, jury and executioner ever had resonance in the first place.

Pow, biff, clunk, thwack, staple

It's that time of year again when one of the tiny people in our house has a birthday. We have two tiny people scuttling around the place, and their birthdays are evenly spaced apart (nearly six months to the day), so the long, decent break between them means the missus and me are always happy to make a bit of an effort.

Actually, scratch that. The missus is always happy to make an effort, it's me that's only happy to make a bit of one.

This year the tiny person in question is mostly fascinated by superheroes. Which is lucky because, as I'm sure you can guess, I'm not exactly anti that kind of thing.

He's also into dinosaurs and pirates, so putting that little lot together sounds like a pretty good theme. Some people might say it goes a little overboard, that it's lost all subtlety, and is a transparent attempt to cover all bases. And to them I would say, "yes, you are correct".

Actually, the tiny person also likes dumper trucks and similarly industrial-looking toy vehicles. But if I included a fourth element we would have lost that fundamental principle of good communication, the tricolon, or rule of three. Sir Winston Churchill didn't say "Never in the history of human endeavour has so much been owed by so many to so few, with so little change in return". Julius Caesar didn't say "I came, I saw, I conquered, I went home again". And Abraham Lincoln didn't say "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, and their pets".

So, you know what? Screw the damn dumper trucks.

In order to try to reinforce the theme throughout our home (the venue for the party) we decided to make bunting. I started with some liberal downloading of free vector images, which I then chopped up, edited, and put back together. The images were especially useful for the dinosaurs, which, frankly, I couldn't be bothered to draw. A few of the other bits and pieces were the result of redrawing images found with Google searches, and a tinier few were even my own work.

I printed them out at my office, turned the paper around, put it back in the machine, and printed them again. I then cut and scored each of the resultant double-sided sheets and took them home.

Meanwhile the missus started on the cakes. She found some images online and went off to Hobbycraft to buy a load of Renshaw coloured icing.

When we were done with all the baking, icing, piping, with all the printing, cutting and stapling, and the cakes were ready and the bunting was up all over the house and garden, then, only then, did I realise the party needed one more thing.

Your friendly, neighbourhood, giant, inflatable, helium-filled Spider-Man balloon.

He took up vigil above the door to the back garden, and the party began.

Finally, after all that hard work, the party was a complete success. Admittedly this may have had less to do with the decorations and more to do with the fact that all the parents were plied with alcohol and all the kids filled up on sugar, but that's a mere detail, right?

Bringing law to the lawless, one swing at a time

If you've been following my 'Dredd' style Abites project, and you've been paying an inordinate amount of attention, plus you've got an excellent memory for obscure details, you may remember there were two remaining footsloggers I was yet to arm up. And when I say 'arm' I don't just mean weapons, but quite literally their upper set of limbs as well. 

I was going to attempt a 'not-so-armless-now' gag, but I think, even by my own low standards, that's scraping the bottom of an already-well-scraped barrel.

A few weeks ago I started work on the two bike cops that will round out this Arbites squad. A few hours later I had switched my efforts to the two guys shown here. Basically once I realised how difficult it was going to be to build the two identical Lawmaster motorcycles, with their distinctive front fairing, lights, badge and weapons, creating the riot shields from scratch, and converting the mauls felt like it could be a comparitively quick win.

It wasn't. 

I'll come back to that. Here's the pic.

Building the mauls was actually a little simpler than I expected. I merely shaved off all the unnecessary bits from the Space Marine Terminator hammers (that I showed at the bottom of this article) and smoothed over any unsightly areas with either liquid poly or green stuff.

It only got complicated when I came to the hands. The Terminator fists looked too big to attach to the Space Marine Scout arms. It made the Judges look like tiny children wearing comedy Hulk gloves. I toyed with the idea of completely cutting them off, but decided I would never get the grip on the replacements to look as convincing. Instead I slowly carved tiny slivers off the existing mitts until I'd made them as small as I could, without them looking silly. Then I pinned them in place with bits of paperclip, and tried to create a perfect seal with more liquid poly.

The shields were more involved. I wanted them to look like slightly modernised versions of the Enforcer shields released by Games Workshop's Specialist Games division, Fanatic, back in the late nineties (or perhaps early noughties). I knew what I had in mind, so started by looking at other manufacturers for proxy models. I can't remember them all now, but some of the contenders were as follows:

• Victoria Miniatures Riot Shields
• MaxMini Anti-Riot Gear
• Anvil Industry Ballistic Shields
• Anvil Industry Riot Shield
• Zinge Industries Riot Shield

I also looked through the existing Games Workshop and Forge World stuff, plus the Kromlech, Puppets War, Spellcrow, Fox Box, Ramshackle Games, Pig Iron Productions and Scibor ranges, not to mention brief dalliances with the shields from the Mantic Enforcer Defenders and After Glow Shield Warriors.

But it was all to no avail. Most of the shields I found had something about them I liked, but didn't quite fit what I had in mind. In the end I decided it would be easier (and cheaper) to make them from scratch. 

I wanted a slight curve on the shield so I started with a discarded shampoo bottle. (You can see it in the same article I mentioned above.) I cut a section out of the bottle, washed it thoroughly and lightly scored its surface with a scalpel to give the glue something to hold onto.

I then used plasticard, green stuff, some no-longer-available modelling rivets from Antenocitis Workshop and a Forge World etched brass imperial eagle to build all the details. 

During construction I decided they looked a little plain, so borrowed an idea from the Mantic Enforcer Defender shield, to reinforce the vision slit, as it added just enough extra detail to break up all those flat surfaces without deviating from the original design too much.

Anyway, after many evenings of fiddly work, glued fingers, and some far-from-inventive cursing, the two Arbites are finally ready to join their fellows on the parade ground.

So this completes the beat cops, leaving me with only the two bikes to finish. After that I can finally start painting. With a little luck I won't have grown old and developed arthritis by then. Fingers crossed. While I can still cross them.

Miniature giants, part one: Khador warjack

I try not to be distracted by new, shiny things, but when it comes to certain miniatures, I have about as much willpower as a three year old in a sweet shop. Except in my case there are no responsible adults dragging me away, and there might even be a paycheque in my pocket, begging to be misappropriated.

So it should come as no surprise that over the last 30 years my miniature collection has come to resemble a Games Workshop store. A Games Workshop store without the display cabinets full of finished models. Just boxes and boxes of unpainted toy soldiers, sitting sadly on shelves, hopelessly sighing 'pick me' every time I choose to randomly abandon whatever I was doing and flit to a new project that probably won't see any real progress for at least two more years.

In my collection of unpainted miniatures there are a whole bunch that aren't affiliated with any of my armies. And among these, one of my especially strong weaknesses* is particularly evident. It's an interest which has manifested itself in at least one other project visible on this blog.

Giant robots.

When I say giant I mean bigger than a man. So the category ends up being quite broad, including anything from a man-sized war droid (as they tend to be slightly larger than their human counterparts, take this guy for example), to the gargantuan walking forts of Battletech, Manga and the Adeptus Mechanicus.

I've just finished painting the first of this arbitrary collection of unaffiliated bots, so I'd like to share it here.

It's one of the original metal Khador Warjacks from the game Warmachine by Privateer Press. I don't own any other miniatures from that game system, but I decided on a little backstory all the same.

He and his Warcaster were cut off from their lines during a scrap in which batterings were liberally handed out by both sides. The Warjack's left pauldron was struck a crushing blow which thrust torn metal down into the shoulder joint, rendering the entire arm useless. Forced to make a tactical withdrawal the two Khadorans holed up in a barn for the night where the Warcaster was able to remove the ragged remains of the pauldron, free up the arm, and effect repairs using the meagre resources at hand.

Or, if you don't like that, try this: Originally I bought the model thinking I could somehow integrate it into my fantasy Chaos terrain project. It was after reading China Miéville's excellent Bas-Lag trilogy, set (at least partly) in the vivid and enchanting steam punk city of New Crobuzon. Without going into too much detail, the series introduces two ideas relevant to the above character. The first is of rogue sentience forming among broken machines in a scrap heap, and the second involves a specialist thaumaturge (wizard) who is able to pull together random inanimate materials to create short-lived ambulant creatures known as golems. My twisted take on this results in the above robot, anachronistically given life by a freak accident (no doubt involving Chaos), haphazardly drawn together from discarded junk, stalking the streets of the cowed and ruined city.

At some point I'll probably also have him turn up in my Warhammer 40,000 city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda. I reckon he'd make for an interesting encounter in a game of Necromunda or 28mm Inquisitor. I can almost feel a backstory forming as I write this. But it's probably best to save that, and use it for one of the other robots in my collection. After all, when it comes to them, I clearly need all the encouragement I can get.


*You're probably not supposed to describe a weakness as strong. 

Mischief, thou art afoot

Today I need to get something off my chest, I need to vent. I have been the victim of plots perpetrated by the forces of Chaos. Two different events, both of which are related to the writing of this blog.

The first incident took place during my attempt to write an earlier entry. The one about Gshtaad the Abomination. It was meant to be a profile of my homegrown Chaos God, acting as an introduction to my old Chaos Warrior miniatures.

But before I wrote it, I knew I wanted to start with a longer, more complicated entry, discussing my thoughts on Games Workshop's Chaos Pantheon. This was to be my argument for why I felt it was okay to invent a new god, and where this fictional deity would slot into the existing Warhammer mythology.

But I couldn't keep this piece short and it started to become a bit laboured. And not just laboured, it seemed to be a story that didn't want to be told. Midway through writing, when I was talking about the Chaos Gods appearing in both Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, I realised I needed to discuss the relationship between these two games before I could go any further. So an additional post had to be written. Then, as I was writing the additional post, more ideas sprung up, meaning a single extra post was not enough. I had other things I needed to say, so I ended up having to write yet another entry.

But I never set out to write either of those two posts. Several thousand words just kind of appeared within me and forced their way out. I really only wanted to talk about the Chaos Pantheon, and its potentially missing Gods. 

But eventually I got back on to that story and started to make some decisive progress. In fact I was almost in sight of my goal, having written about three quarters of the article, when my computer's screen flashed ominously. Everything I had written so far disappeared before my eyes, and while I was messing with apple z an autosave overwrote any chance I had of retrieving an earlier copy. No matter what I did I couldn't get the article to come back. It wasn't saved anywhere else, and I was powerless to undo the damage.

It was my bad, for not keeping a backed-up copy of the article, but that didn't make the fact that I had to start all over again any easier to bear. Quite a few hours of writing and researching needed to be repeated from scratch, after a journey that had already ended up running into months.

The fault was entirely my own, so I did the only sensible thing open to me, and laid the blame firmly at the feet of the Chaos Gods.

Or their tentacles. Whatever.

Not at all how it happened, but a better image than the blank screen I was faced with

And it probably would have ended there, never to be mentioned again, had another event not unfolded just a few weeks later. This second story centres on the tribulations of constructing and painting a large terrain piece.

The piece in question was part of a modular town project I've been working on since I was at college. That means it's been ongoing for nearly twenty years. Except of course it hasn't been ongoing. It's been sitting on a shelf somewhere, forlorn and forgotten about.

The original idea was to build part of an Empire town that had been attacked and overrun by the forces of Chaos. The Chaos connection again.

It started out as a single model, but when I moved house it broke and I had to separate it into component parts. Then the colours that I had painted the first part in were withdrawn and a whole new range of paints released in their place. Then I moved again and the models went into deep storage for several years. When they came out they had suffered all kinds of damage. Eventually after all those years (and repairs and rebuilds and additions), I realised I had to just finish the project and draw a line under it. So I took a day off work and committed myself to finishing. I didn't finish. But I did enough to mean that I was able to wrap it up during the next few evenings. Eventually, a few weeks ago, I completed the whole thing. I reached for the spray varnish, but instead grabbed the black primer. A piece of terrain that I have quite literally been trying to complete for twenty years, got partially resprayed matt black at precisely the moment I thought I was crossing the finishing line.

And now, after repainting the damaged area and repairing the base, all those years after I first started, the terrain is finally complete.

But that's not quite the end of the story. There's an epilogue. Or maybe it's an epitaph? Because, with the release of Age of Sigmar a few months ago, in game terms the finished piece is now out-of-date. The Old World has been destroyed. The Empire and the Northern Wastes no longer exist. My little terrain project no longer has a place in the current continuity.

But I guess that's how Chaos works. Those pesky Chaos Powers. There's no order. No logic. Things happen randomly for no reason.

Or do they? Who knows? It's kind of impossible to tell when Chaos is involved.

Not just nutters, but psychopaths too

Nearly all my Chaos Warriors worship Gshtaad The Abomination. If you can't be bothered to read my post about him, he's basically a kind of halfway house between Khorne, the Blood God and Nurgle, the Lord of Decay, theoretically giving me the freedom to collect miniatures from both ranges, and integrate them into a single, coherent force.

But the boundary line between Khorne and Nurgle isn't the only one I've conveniently ignored for the sake of my Chaos Warrior force.

At various points in Games Workshop's history there have been Chaos Thugs, Chaos Marauders and Chaos Warriors - not to mention the uber warriors known as the Chosen. I always imagined these units, taken in sequence, formed a kind of career path for nasty bad guys. I thought a Chaos follower would start as a young nutter, in a pack of Thugs with little armour and equipment, getting bigger and better at fighting until he's collected enough kills, experience and gear to graduate to full-blown, armoured psychopath.

I therefore liked the idea that the demarkation line between Thugs, Marauders, Warriors and Chosen might not be so straightforward. It could be more blurred than the commercial miniature ranges have been able to portray. So some Warriors might not be in full armour, and some Marauders might not be bare-chested. I figured that the occasional hard-as-nails Warrior might even prefer to lead younger, less experienced goons into the fight, probably as an expression of his narcissism, but perhaps even as some kind of twisted, daemon-worshipper's take on civic duty.

Equally, some Marauders might be so blessed by their chosen God that they're way more muscular than the veterans who have spent a lifetime training and building themselves up. Hulking great youths, rapidly rising through the ranks, forgoing skill and experience in favour of sheer, mindless strength.

And you might also find troops who aren't super tough, dangerous-looking fighters. Instead they are skinny little dudes, press-ganged into the lower ranks, given ill-fitting armour and scrappy weapons, essentially just cannon fodder, desperate to unearth some hidden power before Darwin's selection process brutally removes them from the tribe for good.

So what I'm trying to say is that I actively endeavour to make my Chaos Warrior army as diverse as I can. To compose it from as widely dissimilar parts as possible. To achieve variance. Random variance. You might even want to call it Chaos.