It's a Mad Mad Mad Max World

Hi everyone, let's look at the trailer for Mad Max : Fury Road, shall we?

Okay then!



This trailer makes me very happy, and though I know why, I’m sort of surprised too.

For teenage me the post-apocalyptic world typified by the Mad Max films meant excitement in their Eighties form – fast cars, punks, explosions, anarchy; what adolescent boy doesn’t rally to such vivid imagery? Outwardly they’re irredeemably macho, but offer an opportunity for equality to the clever and inventive, the outsider and loner, and it can make heroes of nearly anyone – but especially these types. It may be the last earthbound incarnation of the Western, relying as it does on themes of transience and dislocation, and the delivery of natural justice in expansive and often barren wildernesses returning to an untamed state (post-apocalyptic films tend to be rarely urbanised in location.)

In many stories there’s an emphasis on the connection between man and beast of burden, where the Western’s horse has become a car or a bike, or sometimes a really big truck - vehicles are big in this world, either swift and lethal cars and bikes or rusting juggernauts of destruction. The nihilism appeals to the teenager inside us – the opening scenes of The Terminator were to my fourteen year old eyes probably the most awesome thing I’d ever seen on the big screen, with colossal tracked vehicles rolling over dusty human skulls. Of course I grew up, and by the time I was an university and the early Nineties arrived, the impetus of desert landscapes, heavy artillery and warfare over oil became a grimmer and actual thing. The same geopolitics had an effect on the Mad Max franchise also, effectively putting it into development hell for twenty years.

The Post-Apocalyptic genre has endured now for well over forty years in film, surviving various iterations – originally a consequence of Cold War and Nuclear Age panic, reasons for the end of civilisation have over the years also included plague, pestilence, rampant technology and, like seemingly every other genre, the post-apocalyptic world has become invaded by zombies too. There’s something inevitable about that, but I feel sorry for this latest addition, as I can’t shake the notion that when zombies enter any genre, that genre is as good as dead – you’re left with a literal zombie, its spark overtaken and driven by a mindless, deathless insatiable shambling mockery of its former living self. I digress.

What's not to love?

The post-apocalyptic movie is a near cousin to the Eighties barbarian flick, being staged in similar epic locations, emphasising brawn and brutality. It’s physicality and Darwinism, and seems to be quite universal – alongside more earnest takes on a post-nuclear world (Threads must be mentioned) knock-offs appeared in other countries such as Spain and Italy (no strangers to the Barbarian genre of course), and of course New Zealand’s very own, beloved Battletruck. And on a side note, Central Otago has never looked so like a desert than now, with its perilous edging towards proper drought. Probably the reason I’ve really enjoyed this trailer then is because it seems to be a return to Max’s world, more tangible now for being removed from the latterday pretenders of zombiedom, Skynet and rampant viruses. At least two of those things could conceivably happen in our lifetimes and pinned social collapse on pure economics – an energy crisis, followed by an environmental one. No mutants, no walking dead, no aliens or killer AIs, just human craziness and an empty landscape. I admire that, as much as the more tribal, less technological aesthetic in Miller’s (re)vision - the spikes and blades which just might be a nod to another Australian predecessor, Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris.

Maybe the other appealing factor of the post-apocalyptic genre is that it’s a social memento mori. When the mundane machines and vehicles of society can be turned so easily into carriages of destruction and brutality when a fragile economy and ecology collapse, it’s a reminder that despite our comfortable trappings, we may figuratively live only two inches of metal away from barbarism. And as I penned this today, somewhat fatefully the Doomsday Clock has returned to its 1984 position of three minutes to midnight.

So now, Mad Max is a nostalgia piece for me first and foremost; an odd place of juvenile thrills. But this trailer’s given me an idea for another modelling project this year – or more than one!

The Return of the King

News in the past fortnight that Arnold Schwarzenegger is to return to the role which made his name, that of Conan the Barbarian, prompted a fair amount of commentary on genre blogs and websites - most of it cautiously positive, if a little on the dismissive side. In 2014, the projected year of release for The Legend of Conan Arnold will be 67. Still, if anyone can fill the role that the first, best, Conan movie left us with of an aged king of the Cimmerians, it's Schwarzenegger - certainly it wasn't without trying, but was without success, that Jason Momoa tried last year. Ouch.

Which really just goes to say that Arnold invented the cinematic Conan, as separate from Robert E Howard's literary version as, say, Sean Connery's James Bond from Ian Fleming's. Howard's Conan is lithe, tall and muscular, but in a non-body building way; John Milius and Dino de Laurentis' version of the Barbarian is more about the bulk and the eye candy - the model for the Eighties cinematic barbarian. 

The barbarian was big in the Eighties, as much a reinvention of a previous movie type (the cowboy) as its other Eighties counterparts the 'road warrior', the ninja, and the cyborg. And it wasn't just movies, as the immediate appeal and recognition factor of the heavily-muscled, tanned and oiled Californian-style hero allowed the type to translate to other visual media - fantasy art, video games, album covers and videos, and of course comics. It may be that Milius' Conan was brought about in part by Marvel's line of Conan comics, but of course the baton was well and truly taken up by European titles like Metal Hurlant as well, and in the UK and in 2000AD Pat Mills too the Conan story and his Celtic roots in another direction again, combining the hero with those of Irish legend, Finn and Cuchulain to create Slaine.

Slaine was a genuine offshoot from Conan rather than a poor relation - Mills took great care in his appropriation of British and European folklore and legend, establishing his hero as a 'warped' warrior, capable of a battle frenzy that would transform him into an erupting, swollen, vicious monster in battle, reminiscent of Cuchulain himself. Here he is drawn by the great Mick McMahon, but through his life in the comic the titular hero would g on to be illustrated by some equally great names - Massimo Belardinelli, Glen Fabry, Dermot Power and most notably Simon Bisley, who would use the Seventies styles of Frank Frazetta and Casaro Renato (who produced the poster art for Conan the Barbarian) to nod back at his own influences. Like Conan, Slaine was never realised as a fully muscle-bound mountain of a man, but he sure as hell turned out that way, and arrived at around the same time as that type was being justly ridiculed by such  strips as Carl Critchlow's Thrud the Barbarian, first published in White Dwarf.

Not that there was anything wrong with Thrud - quite the opposite  I loved Thrud from his tiny pea-head to his massive furry boots, his tiny intellect and Critchlow's sharp satire not only of fantasy literature but of the tropes of RPGs. Which sort of neatly brings us to the other Eighties phenomenono, the role playing game. Both Conan and Slaine got the treatment, though Slaine's came much later, and for a while many of the popular fantasy games seemed to begrudgingly attempt to incorporate the Barbarian (and the ninja, for their sins) as a playable class. I never thought it was a great fit, even if Dungeons and Dragons is based largely on trying to fit disparate element together before handing them over to players and DMs to try to establish some final cohesion. I think that outside their own games, the barbarians of the RPGs I played were better off either as NPCs in their own world, or actually in their own game. maybe it was the way we played them as teenagers, but in a popular sense at least there's the real risk of treating characters like Conan as being one-note, and that's maybe why they never hung around for long in the games.

And so too the barbarian of cinema, as much wish-fulfillment to a generation of awkward teens as their more physically-inclined peers. There's something quite universal about the likes of Conan, his place as a wanderer in an untamed world, that befits a cinematic treatment, and indeed a revival. And just as Clint Eastwood was able to return to the western to portray an aged gunslinger brought out of retirement for one final glorious battle, I hope that those behind The Legend of Conan, Arnold included, will be able to do the same.

Legends of RPG Art: An Artist Reponds

During a recent tidy up of the blog (ongoing, alas) I found to not a little embarrassment a comment on an earlier piece on Russ Nicholson by the great man himself. I remain humbled and not a little shamefaced for missing it.

Much of which is to say, it's great to see that not only is Mr Nicholson still working, but he also has a blog!

So you should go there. It's brilliant, believe me.

And just because I enjoy it, here's another shot of one my favourite Nicholson pieces, the title page for Ian Livingstone's guide to the RPG phenomenon, Dicing With Dragons. Great lines again, with some fine muscular rendering and those cool mountains in the background. I always fancied that this was perhaps in part a portrait of Ian himself, sans glasses and moustache!

Games Workshop - an outsider's view of the Evil Empire

Originally scheduled for June, this has been kicked into touch via a posting over on Morgue's blog.

Like, I think, a good number of 28mm model enthusiasts (insert height/ribald joke here)I have a love-hate relationship with the output of Games Workshop. Overpriced, saturation-marketed and fiendishly pitched at kids while relying on the disposable income of men twice their age, GW has for over twenty years been a business juggernaut. I was once told by a GW shop employee that it was a popular component in the share portfolios of Scottish bankers, simply because its business model 'could not fail.' From the outset as a resource for roleplaying gamers, to a venture producing its own RPGs, then to a tabletop franchise with its own rules system, lead miniatures line and eventually spin-off fiction and electronic gaming arms, GW combined a disparate range of previously and barely crossover hobbies – roleplaying, model making, tabletop warfare, and reinvented the gaming genre almost overnight. Gone was the old line, and, sadly, the excellent White Dwarf magazine, but in their wake a new product and gaming system that was in itself a revolution within gaming culture as well as niche marketing. And of course, when GW were awarded the rights to the New Line Lord of the Rings movie gaming franchise, those portfolios must have been very fat indeed.

It was, though, proper and right that GW would have the franchise, they being a sound business and a sure bet. Incredibly, the company stretched out a three movie world (the rights excluded references to Tolkien's other literary works, although workarounds mysteriously got in there from time to time) to a product line that was still being added to in 2010, a decade after the first movie. And the tie-in strategy game was clever and sympathetic to the source material, concentrating on the skirmish scenario rather than the big battles of say Helm's Deep or the Pellenor Fields (though those did feature later in the game franchise). The models were, by and large, splendid sculpts in metal and quite reliable in plastic (the former reserved for the heroes and villains, while the latter filled in the ‘troops’ of orcs, men, else, what have you).

Outside the LotR range though is where GW continue to make the money, and it’s this ever-expanding, constantly-revised world which represents the ‘real Games Workshop’. I find it a startling contrast to the studied and mannered world of the Rings models with their serious earth–tone movie palettes and scales just shy of the ‘heroic’ (a distortion of human scale which accentuates faces and detail, ideal for picking out as a hobby or on a playmat, while the Rings figures’ proportions were more natural). GW’s figures and scenery – Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,ooo revel in the grotesque and outrageous. The armour is flamboyant, swords are huge and seemingly unwieldy, and guns too, the imagery is part fantasy, part Fascist state and part Spanish Inquisition (and that’s the good guys!) The colour palette is garish, encouraging the hobby’s painters to push the envelope with light and shade, contrast complimentary hues, eschew the muddy and grimy world of real warfare (though there’s a place for that too, in the hobby) for outrageous, dare I say, camp styling. Its figures Pose, rigid macho posturing that is as much about the wish fulfilment of its target audience as it is about the craft behind some astonishing models. And seemingly throughout, the GW Heavy Metal motifs of blades, spikes, Gothic trimming and totenkopf – there’s no space too small to fit in a random skull. Make no mistake, this is a juvenile aesthetic, but an irresistible one, and the pretenders to GW’s throne (Rakham, for example) have readily adopted many of the same styles, acknowledging their popularity. Independent model makers like Hasslefree and Heretic models make GW-like version of heroes and monsters continuing the aesthetic… and the result to me is one of homogeneity. Games Workshop have become so ubiquitous to the point of dominating the fantasy miniatures aesthetic that I find I’m happy to visit Games Workshop’s product line, to marvel at the design, imagination and flair, to tut over the exorbitant price tags, but I’m glad not to be part of it. And I find it becomes rather repetitive very quickly.

Fortunately I’m not alone. There’s a sizeable community of model collectors and painters who have broader tastes, and gladly support the more unique output of the likes of Hasslefree and their compatriots. On the Lead Adventure Forum, a place I regularly visit, there’s great interest in the model miniatures of the 1980s with their less precise and sometimes wonky mouldings, their less uniform approach and broader influences. There’s sometimes a challenge to bring out the best in those figures with paint that GW’s heroic scale can lack, being so prescriptive with its exaggerated scale. And there’s the look of those figures, a relic of past days in gaming when not everything looked like it was drawn by the same team of artists or based on the same house style. I have a small handful of Eighties figures still with me, waiting for a new paint job and a reinvention, and while my skill levels have been raised greatly by exposure to GW’s hobby literature, they won’t be getting the Games Workshop treatment.

Oaken's Twelve

In 2007 Games Workshop began to reach the logical end to its highly-lucrative Lord of the Rings license. Or so it seemed - the movies were well in the past, and the game itself was losing players as those kids introduced to GW through the trilogy connection were either consumed by GW's greater product range, or simply moved on the the next big thing. Those who stuck by the game (and there was a lot going for it) saw some radical redesigns - 'battle companies', allowing true mass army play rather than the skirmish-based scenarios offered to date, and even more obscure models - characters from the novels but not the movies (allowed, under the license), characters based solely on mentions in the book's appendices (also allowed, apparently), and a model for this dude:

But still there was more. Plastic figures to supplement the already classy metal sculpts, armies of 'Wood Elves', 'wandering' Uruk-Hai and a new Ent model. And there were Dwarves - more of them than you could shake a stick at, and certainly more than were ever depicted living or dead in the movie trilogy and book.

Namely these guys:


















Oh sure, GW couched their description in carefully-worded snippets, such as "Dwarf Rangers patrol the lands around every Dwarf Hold, ensuring the safety of their homes from the Dark Lord's servants and wandering monsters..." and "...to help them track their foes and blend in with their surroundings, Dwarf Rangers are more likely to wear natural colors than their kin." In White Dwarf game designer Adam Troke claimed:"We know that Dwarves travel around a lot and don't do so in full armour...", but most fans seemed to know what was more likely to be going on. GW had a license for Lord of the Rings and its appendices, but crucially at that time not The Hobbit and not The Silmarillion. And these guys - a set of 24 plastic Dwarves in hoods and simply armed for 'travelling', looked for all the world like a way to include the Company of Thorin Oakenshield, of whom we'll be hearing a lot about now that The Hobbit has been kicked off and those same travelling Dwarves fully cast.

As it happens I picked up the set - not because I was playing the game, but because I could see how these plastic figures could easily be turned into something approximating Thorin's Company - they were halfway there already, right? And so I did - mostly. But not entirely. And so, with the film Company announced and not yet revealed in their screen attire, I thought I might as well finish the job I started, before the Hobbit movies reduce my versions to being either hopelessly naive or just waaay off the mark.

Legends of RPG Art: Russ Nicholson

Chances are if you played a UK variant of a roleplaying game in the 1980s you would have come across the work of Russ Nicholson. Nicholson's distinctive line art graced the pages of the Fighting Fantasy game books, White Dwarf, and its contribution to the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the infamous Fiend Folio, among other publications. It's in the Folio that his work shows the greatest range and alongside occasional contributions by Erol Otus and some notable UK contemporaries, Nicholson's linear, pointillistic style is the most prominent. Like Otus his concept for a monster, the Folio's Githyanki (originally for WD) survives and remains the definitive visualisation, imitated by successive artists to be one of the few success stories from the book.

Unlike some others of his time Nicholson's approach brought with it the artist's intimate knowledge of historical war gear, which isn't to say his pictures were faithful to history, rather that they were used sympathetically - armour was often rendered a mismatch combination rather than a full-suit (or worse, the deaded chainmail bikini and its variants). He seems to have eschewed the likes of plate mail for the more visually intricate and interesting ring, chain or scale mail. For small work Nicholson's work is sufficiently detailed that you can get lost in them easily, and it remains the main reason I still admire his style, indeed, he's the first fantasy artist I tried to mimic as a teenager. His approach is rarely static in a form (usually bookplate illustrations or monster portraits) that doesn't always invite dynamic poses or movement - but there's movement of line and of shading evident in his work, and a great sense of weight in his characters - he renders flowing robes beautifully, tongues of smoke curl from his dragons' snouts, the rotted clothing of a zombie barely held together, seemingly shredded with decay. His figures are for the most part contrived to be thin or drawn, his goblins especially having pointed features and long noses and limbs, but Nicholson's work isn't strictly speaking all grotesques, as this rendering of a Houri for WD shows, exotic but unfussy, betraying his confessed admiration for the works of Aubrey Beardsley. Of all his work it remains one of my favourites, a great composition with clever use of line weight.


While Beardsley's fantasy work took in the creations of Poe and Wilde and classical mythology Nicholson's artwork features heavily in the 1980s RPG revival of that literature, including a stint illustration Puffin Books' two licensed Robin of Sherwood game books. Coming from his later work it's a little less interesting and a little more realistic - I definitely prefer his early Eighties work, particularly that of his Fighting Fantasy contributions, and namely The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Citadel of Chaos. In fact thinking of those books and their shared world of Allansia, it's Nicholson's artwork that draws it all together for me as the definitive version, an alluring combination of the high, exotic fantasy of, say, the Arabian Nights, and the grimier low fantasy of Lieber and the shabbier corners of Middle Earth. And speaking of which, what could only be a Balrog, the only Tolkien-derived image I could find from the artist, and in colour too.

Edited to add: My sincere thanks to Russ for his comments and clarification below. The above isn't one of his works after all, alas. Thanks for visiting, sir!

White Dwarf - the Old School journal

I'm currently reading Bob Fischer's rather wonderful memo of the UK telefantasy convention scene, Wiffle-Lever to Full! and having got to the chapter on Discworld and Terry Pratchett fandom, am amused to note the author's bemused/cynical observation of the large crossover between Discworld fans, leather coats and Iron Maiden tee shirts. After admitting that he's not averse to Maiden himself ("the 80's stuff at least. Well, the first two albums really") Fischer skips over to reminesce over his own 80's teenage years of playing Dungeons and Dragons (at an age approximate to mine, and similar years too) and listening to said band. It intrigues me, because if you replace the Pratchett angle with 'low fantasy' and a sort of post-Python mocking college humour, exchange Maiden for any number of NWOBHM/Post-prog music and swap the leather coat for... whatever horrid equivalent couture existed back in 1984, then you'd have some key ingredients to what form my impression of the UK RPG scene.

Certainly pre-1988 White Dwarf seems to fit this bill, staffed as it was by bearded ex-university types, contributed to by... maybe more university types and appealing to the same as well as a horde of younger, spottier types such as myself. I've long held the belief that there's a specific boundary of fantasy literature in the Atlantic, and compared to the loftier 'original' from Wisconsin, the D&D played by British adherents seems altogether more earthy, grubby and less serious. That's a sweeping generalisation, but I believe the mindset's there, and indeed continues in the more recent, longer-lived incarnation of White Dwarf today, as Game Workshop's Catalogue That You Have To Buy (tm).

I've read mocking, condescening appraisals of old WD on the Net, but I love my old issues and will probably never part with them (sorry dear!) For one thing they're in a terrible state and only the most desperate collector would want them, having been pored over countless times for new tidbits from other gaming systems (as WD covered back in the day - Runequest, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu were popular ones) to cannibalise and insert into my D&D games. While the US gaming title Dragon was more product faithful and was certainly worthy in its own right, White Dwarf seemed bigger on the inside, and had a defiant streak of wit in its pages, with a must-read Critical Mass fiction review column by Dave Langford, and Thrud the Barbarian and Travellers, satirical strips by future 2000AD artists Carl Critchlow and Mark Harrison. In fact, so attached to my issues was I that I'd forgotten just how few I really had, having to buy them for the most part during trips down to Dunedin while visiting my brother at Uni. Between freinds and I the numbers swelled to possibly early into the double digits, but again, the great Puritan Burning of Roleplaying Game Stuff in 1987 saw to that, and by then my gaming and White Dwarf reading was itself on the wane. Within months in its parent country the magazine radically reinvented itself and evolved into the survivor it is today. But for posterity, and excluding a few Best Ofs and downloaded copies, here are the issues I have.








Oh, almost forgot the Chris Achilleos covers - how cool were they!