Justin Bieber could have been great for DC's comics and films

This is actually a thing that's a year old but here's the short version: Justin Bieber chucked a selfie on the internet a while back with a faked up Batman Vs. Superman script and the hashtag #Robin. It was fake, obviously, there was no script at the time and yadda yadda yadda. I heard about it on an old podcast but the thing is, I got thinking and, well...

It might actually be a good idea.

Oh, don't look at me like that! I have no opinion on Bieber as an artist, good or bad. I've heard a few of his songs, one I found catchy, most I found bland. I have almost no point of comparison for him as an actor. His public persona is obnoxious but since I am as far from the target demographic for his stunts as it is possible to get I'm more than willing to let that pass. Also, everything I just wrote equally applies to my opinion of early-career Elvis so let's see where we stand in twenty years if and when Bieber reaches his mature artistic phase.

Moving on...

You know what casting Justin Bieber as Dick Grayson or Tim Drake would mean if it had happened? It would actually give me, as a viewer, some sense of creative vision behind this film.

I'm not saying good, I'm not saying bad, I'm just saying that creative vision would be seen to exist. Man Of Steel was bland to me. I paid my money, picked up my 3D glasses, sat through the trailers and then the film started. 143 minutes later I left the cinema with no sense of who the production team thought was Clark Kent in any sense other than the visual. I hate Joseph Campbell and his damn mono-myth theory with a fiery passion but if you're going to do the bloody cocking pissing hero's journey then “refusing the call” should involve refusing the bloody call not just looking broody before saving the oil rig crew anyway.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh but in all honestly when I look at Man Of Steel I can't actually point at any aesthetic decision and say it was about Superman. Almost the whole visual style and aesthetic was lifted wholesale from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and the one thing that wasn't, the huge display of military hardware, was straight out of Michael Bay's Transformers series.

So, aesthetic decisions lifted straight from other popular franchises, a longterm plan that's a cut down version of Marvel's Avengers franchise and a character arc with no arc beyond Clark gaining the physical props of Superman (costume, Fortress of Solitude, save Lois, put on some glasses, roll credits). Henry Cavill is actually a very good actor but one with almost zero public profile in the US and only really known for one role here, as Charles Brandon in The Tudors. Casting him says little and all that's left to make a statement with it is what you do with him but... eh, we've covered that.

On a similar level, I like Ben Affleck and I'm eager for his Batman but here we have the opposite problem: an actor whose range is so varied he could comfortably play any version of Batman from Adam West to Michael Keaton. Again, until this performance is on screen we've no way to judge where its going no matter how much Affleck's critics invoke Daredevil.

Bieber, meanwhile, has a huge public profile, a well-known public persona and a built-in following amongst a single demographic not generally associated with comic fandom or films: pre-teen and early-teen girls. Cast this guy as Robin and the statement is clear: stunt casting in the classic Batman tradition and an attempt by at least one arm of DC to actually grow its audience into new demographics. Yes, I would sure as hell question whether he is the right actor to use for those purposes but those purposes are inherently good, especially that last one.

I'm not even saying that in a social justice context, I'm stating it as blatant fact: comics as a business need new audience demographics! The audience is shrinking and has been for years because of poor marketing, limited distribution and an uncanny ability to court all the wrong controversies but most of all because of the companies' fetishistic desire to pour what little marketing budget they do spend on pursuing not a new audience but the same one they've always had: men aged 18 to 35.

So, yeah, comicbook companies: listen up because here's the master plan. Stage one: stunt cast an icon of teeny-bopper pop as Robin to draw young girls into the theatre. Step two: embrace the fact that comic films are at least halfway marketing stunts for your product and put an advert for your comics at the end of the trailers, “if you like the film why not try...” yadda yadda yadda, you can see where this goes. Most importantly, stage three is...

… DO NOTHING ELSE!

I am not kidding, this is the most important stage of the master plan. Once you have this new audience drawn in and trying out your comics you DO NOTHING ELSE! Keep the product as it is. Oh, by all means stop screwing up on the race and gender fronts but that's a separate debate. The product, absent its frequent socio-political failures, is fine. Female fandom exists, it exists in spite of the considerable apathy and even hostility publishers have demonstrated towards it for decades.

And if you're thinking about introducing a bunch of new female characters to please this demographic then STOP! That's called pandering and even little girls will notice it. Women and girls don't need female characters to identify with any more than I need a male figure to identify with. Audience identification is a really weird concept and a bit false and some day I will write a takedown of the whole bloody thing but that is not this day.

That said, there is virtue in exploiting the female IPs the companies already own better than they do. Here are the female intellectual properties from the Big Two I wrote down off the top of my head over the course of half-watching a five minute internet video (I don't own a stopwatch):

Wonder Woman, Birds Of Prey, Storm, three flavours of Batgirl, Batwoman, Kate Bishop as Hawkeye, Black Canary, Huntress, Power Girl, three flavours of Spider-Woman, two flavours of Spider-Girl, Black Cat, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Ms.Marvel, Renee Montoya as a cop or as The Question, Rogue, She-Hulk, X-23, Wonder Girl, Catwoman, Supergirl, Mystique, Zatanna, Harley Quinn and slap in the Young Avengers for having an admirable equal focus on male and female characters throughout its comparatively short history...

… and going back to my earlier point these are just properties that either currently or in the recent past have supported at least a decent length limited series. Exploiting that, and they're getting better at exploiting that, alongside existing product is the smart move. You know why?

Because girl geeks are as completist as boy geeks. Draw then into a character and they're going to want to read up on that character's history and you want that history to exist and be in print to sell it to them. New characters don't have that, established characters do.

So, yeah, a genuine argument about how Justin Bieber could be the best thing to happen to the comics industry in years.

The Comics Ramble: Hope Springs (Batman) Eternal

You want to know my dirty little secret? The thing that I keep at the back of my mind in a world of constant disappointment, dashed hopes and thwarted expectations? I want everything to succeed. I don't expect everything to succeed but I want it to. I want Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice to break the pattern of DC film offerings and be a fantastic movie. I want to like whatever old or obscure junk my friends point me to on the internet. And do you know what? Bitch and moan as I do I want The New 52 to be the game-changing, artistically inspiring revival DC was hoping for.

The New 52 has outlasted my expectations, no two ways about it. When it was announced I thought it would last a year, two at pinch and here we are three years down the line and it is still DC's main publishing continuity. Three years is a long time, long enough that I'm a different person now than when Justice League #1 came out and this experiment has had a good while to validate itself. So has it? Just in my own highly subjective personal view?

Eh... very nearly almost.

Now, one of the problems I had with this idea out of the gate was that DC was mixing soft and hard reboots within the same initiative. Batman and Green Lantern (Green Lantern especially) were basically continuing where they left off with a slightly adjusted past timeline, soft as it comes. Wonder Woman was getting a new cast and status quo but that's just what happens to Wonder Woman and she's never needed a reboot for it, that's what she calls “getting a new writer”. Meanwhile the Teen Titans suddenly have a whole new history: Tim Drake is their founding father now, the Dick Grayson era Titans were never a team, in fact only three of them seem to exist in the New 52. That's an astonishingly hard reboot compared to what Hal Jordan and Bruce Wayne went through.

Reboots happen, though, and what mattered to me then and matters to me now are the stories being told in this new framework. Does what has been done creatively validate the business decision that started it all?

As I said: very nearly almost, in a few cases, a bit.

The simple fact is that after three years DC is finally getting its collective head around what it wants and how it wants to achieve it. This should probably have been a realisation that came a bit sooner (preferably three or four years sooner) but here we are and at least it does feel like the moment has arrived and that moment is called Batman Eternal.

I already mentioned in my Tim Drake/Harper Row post (and the series really needs to return to them at some point) that I liked the series but I want to get into the real nuts and bolts of how Eternal works and why it works. You see, the whole series is devoted, on multiple layers, to asking and answering one question:

How in the hell does Gotham City work?

The answer is presented mechanically by removing one of the city's most essential moving parts as Jim Gordon is indicted for multiple counts of manslaughter and watching the whole thing fall apart. And here we have the crux of the matter: with this move DC is finally taking advantage of the door they opened when they made everyone younger and less experienced. The pre-Flashpoint Jim Gordon was practically as sainted a figure in the fiction as he was within fandom. He'd been Commissioner forever, he'd pretty much succeeded in stamping out police corruption in the GCPD or at last at Gotham Central itself and he was damn near untouchable on a moral and ethical level.

New 52 Jim is younger and has been Commissioner for about six years. He's not as popular as he was pre-Flashpoint and his crusade against corruption isn't as advanced (look at his immediate successor for evidence of that). From a storyline perspective there's more weight to the public siding against him than there would have been before. Yes, we know he's innocent because he's Commissioner Gordon but the backlash is at least believable.

It's not just Jim, either. Eternal finally integrates the new Tim Drake into the Bat-family. Death of the Family and a few stray guest appearances where he was a visitor notwithstanding this is genuinely the first time we've seen this Red Robin operate in Gotham. He has his own base in the city, possibly even several, and this causes tension between him and Bruce but obviously the tension is manageable or even a joke since Tim still has his Gotham privileges. Y'know, not that I think even Bruce could revoke those from Tim even if he tried. The fact is, though, that this relationship is subtly different from their pre-Flashpoint one: Bruce is a former mentor Tim isn't too worried about pissing off instead of the stand-in father he wants to surpass, which is probably down to this Tim not being an orphan.

And that's not even mentioning the two characters Eternal has introduced to the New 52: the Spectre and Spoiler. Corrigan we've seen the least of but this version seems actively afraid of the Spectre which, whilst not out of line with past interpretations, is at least an interesting choice of several potential angles.

Spoiler meanwhile... well, they really thought that one through. We're finally at a point where she has a costume and has chosen her hero name but they've actually thought about how the word she chose to describe herself has changed in the years since her original introduction:

Spoiler is now a vigilante with a blog!

This isn't me being a sad bastard and identifying with a character because of my hobby, by the way, which was obviously what DC was courting when they did a similar thing to Superman. This is me laughing with DC at a cool idea that ties in with not only modernising the character to include an angle modern, baggage-free readers would actually expect and a funny little acknowledgement of the role internet fandom has played in her enduring popularity and multiple resurrections.

And dear God they have finally worked out what they want to do with Jason Bard. This guy again. This guy just turns up and I don't know what he was originally but I've seen him used as a street level PI free of Bat-connections, a uniform cop witless foil for Barbara Gordon, a dirty tricks man for Tim Drake and now as “l'il Jim Gordon” with a twist. So, yes, this angle is interesting, this angle is good, let's run with this, see it through and maybe then we can finally say we have the definitive Jason Bard interpretation and move on. Still, though, this is a case of using an existing character name and the broads strokes of their past incarnations to wrongfoot the audience because what nearly every version of Bard has agreed with is that he's a bit shady but ultimately on the side of law and order. This creates expectations of the new version and that you can play with and DC has, gleefully.

Now, I'm specifically singling out Eternal because there's enough meat for a whole Comics Ramble in it. It isn't the only example. Wonder Woman has been taking advantage of the new start from day one; the latest Teen Titans run under Will Pfeifer is examining how superheroes and social media would interact; Justice League United shows huge promise; and I am absolutely fascinated by Grayson. Like I said, the New 52 is on its way to being validated as an experiment...

… if its lucky. 

The triumphant non-return of Cass Cain

(Due diligence: I have not received last Wednesday's comics yet because of postal issues therefore I'm writing about the “semi-canon” return of Cassandra Cain sight unseen. That said it's basically a what if story in Gail Simone's goodbye issue so I doubt there's much to fruitfully interpret. This post is my case for why this needs to go further and we need to see Cass properly reinstated into the present day New 52. I've been meaning to write this for a while, basically since Steph's return was announced, and Batgirl: Futures End gives me the perfect excuse.

On with the motley...)

So, about two years ago someone at DC did a stupid and referred to Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain as “toxic” characters in reference to not allowing them to be used in a Smallville comic. They could have gone with “We want to firmly re-establish Barbara Gordon as the sole version of Batgirl for the time being and are not pursuing the development of other characters who have embodied the role” but instead they went with “toxic” and other people at DC confirmed the quote and even agreed with the description.

This, of course, has changed. Steph is now a big presence in a tentpole Batman series and Gail Simone has used Cassandra Cain (and the Steph Brown Batgirl) in the Futures End issue of Batgirl. A few things need to be mentioned about this before we move on. This issue was, of course, Simone's last; it was set in a future that likely will never be explored outside of the Futures End series; and Simone has already made some other fanservice casting choices during her final arc like slipping Misfit in for a single panel cameo. This might be nothing more than a big author on her victory lap being allowed to slip in a few fan-pleasing Easter eggs now there's no chance she'll try to pursue them.

However, I think there are good reasons to reintroduce Cass to DC continuity proper beyond mere fanservice. You see, Cass has a unique distinction amongst female Bat-characters.

Look at the boys who help Batman: Alfred, Dick, Tim, Jason and Damian. Bruce calls them family: his surrogate father and his adopted and biological sons, they're an inner circle who have all lived at Wayne Manor at one time or another and have always known Bruce's secret. The female Gotham heroes (Barbara Gordon, Kate Kate, Helena Bertinelli, Kathy Kane, Steph Brown, Renee Montoya) tend to be independent operators with their own resources, to whom Bruce is at least initially antagonistic and he doesn't usually reveal his identity to them. Of that whole list I think only Barbara and Steph know “the secret”, at least as far as I'm aware.

Cass defies the distinction, probably because she's the youngest woman to be Batgirl: high school age instead of college age. She was more analogous to a Robin in many ways and she even slept at Wayne Manor every now and again. She's family, taken in by Bruce in the same way the Robins were and that's unique for a female sidekick.

So, bring back Batman's only begotten daughter, is basically what I'm saying.

There are a couple of other angles that should be mentioned. Aside from Batwing and absent Renee Montoya the Bat-books are rather short on characters of colour these days. Also on the inclusivity side there's the fact Cass has a disability, albeit an inconsistent one, being either illiterate due to her upbringing or profoundly dyslexic depending on who's writing her.

Mainly, though, I want her back because she was really interesting me again in the lead up to Flashpoint. She had a bad couple of years between the end of her ongoing series and Batman Incorporated. First she was a villain then there was a pretty bad limited series and then she was just wandering the world off-panel after she gave Steph the Batgirl identity. Then Batman Inc. happened and she became the Black Bat, Batman's woman in Hong Kong. She turned up once or twice in Red Robin, Batman Incorporated and Gates Of Gotham but we never really got to see what sort of adventures she had on her own in her new identity in her own city.

Let me pitch this to you. The Black Bat: a female Nightwing operating in East Asia. Sells itself, doesn't it?

In all seriousness, it felt like the character was going somewhere again. Since I've already argued that Cass had the character progression of a Robin instead of a Batgirl the next step for her is the inevitable change to a solo hero with her own identity like Nightwing, Red Hood and Red Robin. But we never got it, we were just teased with it and now she's in limbo halfway through a major, necessary transformation and it strikes me as a massive missed opportunity if nothing else. 

Relative value and not pre-ordering Space Hulk

I didn't order Space Hulk in the end and I'm pretty much writing this post because the last week rather suggested I would end up building, painting and reviewing the thing. Well, I'm not and the only interesting thing to say about that is a short digression on the notion of post-purchase value:

Most Games Workshop miniatures I buy are for practical purposes. I buy the odd character model just for the pleasure of painting them but the vast majority of them are bought for the express purpose of using them in games. I'll drop a tenner on a character I just think looks cool but £75 for admittedly cool Terminators I probably won't use, Genestealers I never will and a bunch of other stuff that is no use to me since no one I know wants to play Space Hulk...?

I might even have still gone for it if not for the fact a better deal came my way:

Big Finish does a lot of weekend deals and this weekend they were offering the season season of their Fourth Doctor Adventures for a grand total of £38.50 and I will get far more pleasure out of those seven stories that I can confidently assume I'll list to a couple of times a piece than out of twelve Terminators I will paint, put in a draw and forget about.

And if I'm honest, now that I have professionally shot 'Eavy Metal images to look at again, my memories of those Terminators was a bit rose-tinted. I think they are better than Wolf Guard Terminators but I'm not now convinced that they beat out Deathwing Knights and I have a nascent Guardians Of The Covenant army I'd rather expand than start a Blood Angels army I'm not too invested in.

Yeah, I said this wasn't going to be interesting, right?

My one and only opinion on Michael Bay's Transformers

I've got friends who are big Transformers fans. For my part the toys were quite cool if clunky when viewed with adult eyes (I'd swear more of them had moveable legs) and the Simon Furman comics are comfort food to me to this day. I have friends who self-identify as fans of the franchise and who absolutely hate the Michael Bay movies. This isn't exactly controversial, there's a lot of fan hatred for them and Goggling “Michael Bay Transformers racism” certainly brings up some interesting results.

All that said I've only seen the first one so whenever the series comes up I have only one contribution to make. It's an odd opinion, I'm told, but the only one I can offer:

I think there's a good movie hiding in Transformers, it just isn't a movie about Transformers.

The good movie that isn't quite there is one about that group of soldiers trudging across the desert being hunted by a giant robot scorpion. There's some good moments there and probably the best gag of the film when the sergeant gets his satellite phone working and has to deal with a bored, obstreperous telephone operator whilst the squad is fighting off said giant robot scorpion. It isn't a very clever joke but it was effective.

My impressions of the rest of the film? I don't really remember it that well and there isn't that much distance between now and when I saw it. I didn't see it in the cinema, I saw it on TV about a year ago. I remember the desert bit, I remember Optimus Prime demolishing an ornamental fountain (okay, that was the best joke...) and an Autobot dying but I couldn't honestly have told you which one, then or now.

So I can't really get offended or upset about these films. I've never held the belief that a bad reboot inherently devalues what came before, my childhood memories and old comics are safe. The Bay films can't even be accused of derailing the franchise, an accusation I've often levelled at the New 52, because IDW continues to publish multiple series based on the toys and characters I have nostalgia for (pretty good comics, too). I can't even accuse Bay of causing me to waste time and money on his product because I've only seen the one and I watched it on TV, probably whilst getting something else done like painting miniatures or writing blog posts.

As such I find myself on the outside of this one. I'm more than willing to accept most of the common criticisms of Bay's movies, in this franchise and others, but I'm not personally offended by them as many self-identified Transformers fans are. I feel like I should feel it when I hear others hold forth on it, though, and that's an interesting sensation.

I suppose I could always expose myself to the other movies so I can be up to speed on the outrage but that genuinely seems like giving Michael Bay more of my time and brain space than he frankly deserves. 

Jumping Ship (Tim Drake, Steph Brown and Harper Row)

First, let me say this so there's no ambiguity: I'm grateful that Steph is back. I like the way she's being brought back: origin polished up a bit, still in keeping with the character we remember and with earnest promises that there are plans for her after Batman Eternal wraps. This is good, I'm glad to see it and very enthused for where its all going next, but...

My God, am I seeing great chemistry between Tim Drake and Harper Row!

It certainly helps that Eternal has taken the New 52 Tim and reverted him to type just a little. Tim is one of those characters to me, we all have them, who is so bound up in how I got into comics that I'm a bit precious about him. Chuck Dixon's Robin wasn't the first series I read but it was the first series I went looking for back issues and collections of, the first time I learned to look for a creator's name. I watched this character grow through Dixon's run, through Young Justice, through Bill Willingham's run (look, we all make mistakes) and then to become a truly spectacular solo act in the Red Robin ongoing.

Then it all got swept away. I'll say this straight: I am not a fan of the new origin Scott Lobdell set down in Teen Titans #0 or the whole attitude of trying to place Tim totally outside the Bat-family. What I like about Eternal's Tim is that he's back in Gotham yet retains the lone wolf vibe he developed coming out of Batman Reborn plus the one aspect of the New 52 version I liked: his focus on looking out for the young people who suffer when the adults fight.

Add to this mix young Harper Row, future Robin-esque Bat-sidekick (according to that Eternal teaser that interrupted Zero Year) who has enforced her help on Tim the way Tim did to Batman back in the day. Okay, that's not such a good description of Tim's new origin but the New 52 is more about cultural memory than a literal chain of events laid down by continuity. That's my theory and it helps to make the New 52 a bit more palatable and comprehensible. She's also as dedicated to her own area of social justice as he is, except her focus is the poor of Gotham rather than the young of the world.

Of course, their mutual arrogance has placed the two of them in conflict almost since the moment they met but Tim has something of a history with stubborn women. Almost exclusively with stubborn women, now I think about it, between Steph, Lynx, Wonder Girl and Tam Fox.

You know, listing it out like that it occurs to me just how celibate Tim's been since Flashpoint. I think the only time he's managed to get any in the last three years was when he got possessed by Trigon and fooled around with Solstice which... ugh, no.

What I'm basically saying is this: we have two alpha-type personalities who are techy, stubborn and arrogant and I really want to see the sparks fly. 

Space Hulk: The Self-Justification Phase

I'll say this for being a wargamer: its honed my sense of buyer's guilt to the point that I feel it BEFORE I've made the unwise purchase. On the one hand this is good and has prevented me from starting literally dozens of armies I didn't actually have the requisite time, cash or inspiration for. So yes, having geeked out for a bit over the possibility of Space Hulk being re-released and the re-release having been confirmed by leaked images I'm now having this running debate in my head:

“Yay! Space Hulk is coming out again and I've just been paid at my fairly steady, safe job so I can afford it now like I couldn't in 2009!!”

“Yes, but aren't you concentrating on your Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts at the moment?”

“True, but its a limited release so if I want it I have to buy it now or never (or wait five years, possibly).”

“You never play 40k anymore.”

“Dan's getting back into it so I might do soon.”

“What, with Tyranids? With Blood Angels?”

“I might.”

“You can't get a grip on Tyranids because you like writing characters and you hate the Blood Angels with their stupid colour-coded helmets.”

“There are successor chapters.”

“Yeah, there are three you like but a) there are bareheaded Terminators so they can't be Angels Sanguine; b) they're too blinged out to match your vision of Flesh Tearers; and c) you've never found a way to paint Lamenters you liked since they stopped making Tau Sept Ochre.”

“Yeah, that does still rankle.”

“You could always paint them purple and call them Soul Drinkers.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Yes.”

“Look, bottom line: I've spent five years wishing I'd been able to scrape the doubloons together to buy this every time I see a picture of Sergeant bloody Lorenzo and his awesome cape. Quite besides, this might all be moot: I'm getting out of work at 7 tomorrow and it'll take me twenty minutes to get down to GW. It might even be sold out by the time I get there. Let's say I'll buy it if the ineffable machinations of fate allow me to and be done with the debate.”

“You realise you're going to have to spend an extra tenner on round bases, right?”

“So be it.”

“Angels Encarmine?”

“No way, I'd have to paint the Death Company white.” 

16 Weeks, 80 Models, the Reign of 1,000,000 Years

This was actually inspired by the Warhammer World trip I'll now not be able to make but I'm determined to salvage something from it all. You see, I had this notion of giving my Tomb Kings their inaugural game at Warhammer World. On what would have been my first visit to Warhammer World, actually. Not going to happen now but before I found that out I came up with a pretty workable army list for getting ready in time and it goes a little something like this:

Lords

Tomb King (170) armed with great weapon (6) and wearing light armour and riding a chariot (55). 231 points

Heroes

Liche Priest (70), Level 2 Wizard (35) using the Lore of Nehekhara. Hierophant. 105 points

Liche Priest (70), Level 2 Wizard (35) using the Lore of Nehekhara. 105 points

Necrotect (60) armed with two hand weapons including whip wearing light armour. 60 points

Core

3 Skeleton Chariots (165) pulled by Skeletal Steeds each crewed by 2 Skeleton Charioteers armed with spears and bows, full command (30). 195 points

5 Skeleton Horse Archers (70) armed with bows, full command (30). 100 points

20 Skeleton Warriors (80) armed with spears (20), shields and light armour (20), full command (30). 150 points

20 Skeleton Warriors (80) armed with hand weapons, shields and light armour (20), full command (30). 130 points

Special

3 Sepulchral Stalkers (165). 165 points

20 Tomb Guard (220) armed with halberds (40) and shields, full command (30). 290 points

Tomb Scorpion (85). 85 points

3 Ushabti (150) with great weapons, champion (10). 160 points

Rare

Necrosphinx (225). 225 points

Total: 2001 points

There are sixteen weeks until New Year and this army, which is pretty elite by my standards, has eighty models so that works out at five models a week. Fair declaration: I do actually have fifteen Skeleton Spearmen finished already from my last stab at this army so that's even less work to do (though I'm not too happy with them and might re-paint them if I have time at the end of the project).

Having not played the army myself and, in fact, never having played against Tomb Kings in my life I'm forced to go back to first principles: include what I seem to need and then just pick up what looks pretty. I've got the basic sort of general; the necessary wizards; a buffing character I like the sculpt of; plenty of core plastics; and finally lots and lots of pretty centrepiece kits.

The reward tree needs a little tweaking since there are things I actually need to finish now and it reads like this:

500 points: Ushabti.

1000 points: Necrosphinx

… then we'll see where we are when we get to 1500. Probably I'll start rewarding myself with minis from outside the Tomb Kings to offset boredom. The Warsphinx will be painted one day (sorry, Matt, it was a lovely present) but, to be honest, I'm kind of going off the idea of buying Nagash. It's a lovely model but not of much use to me. The Undead Legion is cool but I've never been one for special characters. I might get a Mortarch kit to make a Vampire Lord on Abyssal Steed (which is what it is for, I don't care what anyone else says). Okay, let's say that for 1500, provisionally.

Project Tracker

15 of 80 models completed.

Reward Tracker

15 Skeletons Warriors with spears, shields and light armour = 90 points (410 points to next reward). 

Sometimes the universe just gives you stuff

So two days before a house inspection is a great time for your shower drain and bathroom sink to both clog. Add in a few work issues and having to cancel a trip I was really looking forward to but then the internet just out of nowhere delivered me two really, really great announcements:

ANNOUNCEMENT ONE: Gail Simone's super secret post-Batgirl project is a Secret Six relaunch! Not entirely the old team, it seems, but the Comicbook Resources article name checks Catman and Black Alice and since Simone is apparently incapable of writing a series without Ragdoll turning up I can but hope.

It could go wrong, anything can go wrong. Maybe DC will have put some creative fetters on Simone when the last incarnation of the series thrived on editorial distance. Maybe the law of diminishing returns will strike as it often does when an author returns to one of their great works a few years down the line. It must be said, thought, that DC has been making real improvements ion the not-fucking-up stakes this past year so I feel positive about this announcement. If this had been announced in 2012 I'd have very little faith in it. We shall see.

ANNOUNCEMENT (-sh) TWO: a teaser video on Games Workshop's blog that (please please please) points to a Space Hulk set coming to pre-order next weekend. It shows a Space Marine being strapped into Terminator armour with flashes of Genestealers spliced in.

I can't begin to think of another interpretation of putting those two images together. If it is Space Hulk then I'm in. I was completely broke when the last set came out in 2009 and it sold out on me in about a day. Those Blood Angels Terminators were gorgeous and even after five years have never been bettered: not by Wolf Guard Terminators, not by Deathwing Knights, not even by the Forge World sculpts.

Whether its a new set (I am kind of hoping for the “other” Space Hulk Terminators: Dark Angels Deathwing) or just a re-release of the 2009 set I am absolutely, definitely putting money down for this. 

The Companion Chronicles to return as box sets. Yay!

There was an article in Big Finish's Vortex magazine about their new series The Early Adventures that slipped in, off-handedly, that The Companion Chronicles would be returning next year as box sets.

Now, to set out some biases off the bat: The Companion Chronicles is my favourite Doctor Who series ever. Not the modern series, not the classic series, the McGann audios or even the hallowed New Adventures but The Companion Chronicles. I'm not trying to be contrarian but the series was consistently inventive both in offering new perspectives on classic characters and by experimenting with different narrative approaches to work with the limits of a small cast, usually of no more than two actors. By necessity they were very character based and given how underwritten many of these characters were on television it gave the actors a real chance to shine.

I loved them but I did respected that Big Finish chose to end them when they were riding high. After eight seasons and a few specials the series clocked up over eighty releases and if ideas were getting thin on the ground I'd rather have eight seasons of enjoyable and inventive than having two or three more seasons of flogging a dying horse.

Am I looking forward to the box sets? Hell yes.

One thing The Companion Chronicles were great at was working with their limitations, they were designed around them. The whole idea was to give Big Finish a way to tell stories for eras where principal actors have passed away. The series expanded a little from that initial brief in its middle years but that was always the core of the project: First, Second, Third and (when Tom Baker wasn't yet on contract) Fourth Doctor stories when full cast stories weren't possible. The general format was a companion actor (again, this occasionally went off-topic) and one other actor. Most were basically talking books with dialogue sections whilst some were fully dramatised two-handers.

I think the box set format might be a nice new limitation for them to play with. Box sets have generally been good for Big Finish series. In fact, with the mini-season format the Main Range adopted in 2009, The Companion Chronicles were the last man standing in the anthology format. I did like the anthology format, I did like getting a different TARDIS team every month but I think a tighter focus is almost always a good thing.

As supporting evidence I give you another BFP series to go from singles to boxes: Bernice Summerfield, which ran for eleven series as singles before going to box sets for its last six. The singles had an overarching plot that was sprawling and very hard to get into whilst the switch to box sets provided a tighter focus. Each box has had a theme or a setting of its own and then spends however many discs exploring the high points of the concept before the next one offers up its own idea.

Yes, there have been boxes where I wish the big idea had lasted longer. I genuinely think Epoch was a couple of discs too short but is that even a criticism? The fact that I was left wanting to hear more of Bernice's life in Atlantis and the idea of a world where all history more than 57 years old is banned just means the writers cut themselves off before the idea had a chance to go stale, which is exactly what I praised The Companion Chronicles for doing at the top of this post. 

The End Times army I'd like to see

Okay, this is not so much a wishlist as working out a grudge with Games Workshop. In fairness, though, it is my only grudge. If you're expecting one of those bitter anti-GW rants that inevitably involve the phrase “Games Workshop has ruined my hobby” followed by unnecessary numbers of exclamation marks this is not that. This is a bit of nostalgia that just might come to pass if things are going the way they seem to be.

You see, if there's one thing we can confidently predict about The End Time its that one of the supplements will be about Chaos. GW's basically doing an all-singing all-dancing remake of Storm Of Chaos and you can't really do that without a Chaos supplement of some sort.

And if that's what they're going to do they couldn't do better than resurrecting the Horde Of Chaos method of army building.

The way this worked, for the benefit of the young, is that in the hallowed 6^th edition we had two Chaos army books: Hordes of Chaos and Beasts of Chaos with Chaos Warriors and Daemons lumped together in the former. You chose your general (a Chaos Lord, a Daemon or a Beastlord) and then Core units like him stayed Core and other Core units became Special. So if you had, say, a Great Unclean One as your general then Plaguebearers and other Daemons were Core whilst Chaos Warriors, Marauders and the like became Special.

Specials and Rares stayed as they were, incidentally.

Having read the Empire vs. Nurgle Chaos Horde sections of Nagash it really tickled my sense of nostalgia but also my sense of annoyance. You see, in the Hordes Of Chaos days I loved the idea but all the Daemon models back then were metal and super expensive. These days they're all plastic but they've also been hived off into their own army and because I like to personalise my generals and get inside their head when I write them a pure Daemon army just doesn't grab me. So the army I loved was first too expensive and then not game legal.

I say this might happen because a) a Chaos supplement seems inevitable and b) the Undead Legion was a nostalgia trip to the old Undead Army Book of 5^th edition.

If nothing else, I'm a Bretonnia player and hope comes naturally to me. 

That's Quite Shiny: Morghasts and Spirit Hosts

Its that time of week again and the GW pre-orders are up! After two weeks of single model releases (albeit a very versatile single model last week) this week they're pushing the boat out with two models!

I'm being facetious because both kits are absolutely gorgeousy. To start there are the Morghast Archai/Harbingers, two models for £36 and they're huge by the look of them. They more than fill their chariot bases and those bone wings are fantastic. There are already people online calling this kit the “two for one Nurgle Daemon Prince box” and I won't disagree, seems like a great use for them.

I can't really say more about what I think of them because I haven't actually reached their background in the Nagash books. As such I don't know how well what they look like matches up with what they're meant to represents. That's really the big test of a model as far as I'm concerned.

Perversely it isn't the big winged bone things of awesomeness that are catching my attention this week but the rather more modest Spirit Hosts (3 bases for £16). I've wanted Spirit Hosts for my Vampire Counts for years but the standing miniatures were... well, look at them...

Good in their time, I am sure, but outdated now. If we could just get some decent Fell Bats that would pretty much complete the range. 

Jane Foster is a creepy Silver Age girlfriend

She's a bit of a chameleon is The Mighty Thor's Jane Foster: she's been a nurse, a doctor, an astrophysicist and a hippie groupie type in various incarnations but of course, since she started off in the Silver Age, she was also intensely creepy and stalker-ish:

I don't know what issue this is from but it does illustrate the deep, terrifying levels of insanity Silver Age writers used to think was part and parcel of being a love interest. Still, I suppose that's one way of introducing agency and “strength” to a female character: the genuine belief that you can dominate a warrior god into submission.

It's insane, it's creepy and far from a healthy portrayal of female sexuality but sometimes with old comics you have to take whatever agency you can get. 

Bretonnian ponderings

There was going to be an End Times post today but then I ran out of steam. We'll get back to it, I'm sure, but for now I'm pondering my much delayed Bretonnia army. Now, my focus up to the end of the year will be the Tomb Kings but since I'm going to need to do a lot of conversion on the Bretons to make a full army it'll have to be a slow build even before we take into account painting all that heraldry.

So, yeah, the things the Bretonnia range is currently missing: generic knightly characters, Questing Knights, Mounted Yeomen, the Grail Reliquae, Mounted Yeomen, Grail Knights and the Field Trebuchet. We're good for core plastics and Pegasus Knights but that's are a lot of things I'll either have to convert or do without.

I've been at this long enough that I remember when this sort of thing was business as usual. I remember the days when character classes and even whole units had no models for them. I had a Lost And The Damned army! I converted ninety mutants! This is nothing!

So, a few initial ideas:

Questing Knights

The name Graeme Friend Of Dwarves has always been an inspiring one to me. I was just going to paint an old Questing Lord in his colours but now I have all these spare champion weapons from my Dwarf Longbeards that don't seem too badly scaled to the knights. If I can chop the ball join flat I think I can wed the Dwarf great weapons to the knights with little difficulty.

More challenging are the piles of junk Questing Knights generally carry around, having no home to go back to and all. I'll have to raid my bits box and anyone else's I can get my hands on for random objects.

Mounted Yeomen

I once saw (and stupidly failed to save) a tutorial on merging Bretonnian Men-At-Arms and Empire Pistoliers to make Yeomen. Shouldn't be too hard to do if I can find the right spot to chop the Men-At-Arms in half at.

Grail Reliquae and Battle Pilgrims

Battle Pilgrims, easy: Empire Flagellants with the twin-tailed comets filed off and as much Bretonnian props glued to them as I can find. Grail Reliquae, far harder. I did own a Grail Reliquae so hopefully I can dig that up, strip the awful teenage paint job and just set it up in the middle of the Flagellants.

Trebuchet

There's only one other Trebuchet in GW's range and its terrible. Again, hopefully my old one has survived somewhere.

Grail Knights

Unbelievably this is the trickiest proposition. It seems easy: they're armed and armoured exactly the same as Knights Of The Realm and therein lies the problem: making the buggers look distinct. My first idea is to strap lots of those little heraldic shields to their shoulders and I think there are some big fleur de lys I could use somewhere on the model (chest, maybe) but aside from that I'm kind of out of ideas.

Still, if I make the Questing Knights first it'll be a while before I have to worry about the Grails. 

The End Times: Character death and product

(Page 190 now, I'm not usually this slow a reader but this is a book I really want to take in rather than rush through and forget. This post, as the title suggests, is about character death so beware THE MOST SERIOUS SPOILERS THIS WEEK though certainly don't expect an exhaustive list because that isn't what this is.)

Even if you set aside the wholesale annihilation of the Border Princes, Estalia, most of Kislev and everything Tilean north of Sartosa, The End Times: Nagash still has an absolutely epic amount of significant deaths in it. I've already held forth on the rubbing out of Heinrich Kemmler but by this point I have to concede that Warhammer's most vintage villain dying is small potatoes.

In a moment of mild cynicism my friend Matt and I wondered how many of these deaths would match up to old or out-of-production models but I'm... not exactly “happy” but shall we say “reassured” that this hasn't been the case. Yes, Kemmler's sculpt is ancient and all the Bretonnian special characters are either dead, missing or so transformed you'd expect a new model when the time comes around. Now I like the Fay Enchantress, King Leoun Leonceour and the Green Knight but they all have chunky, blunt swords and suffer various scaling issues, not least of which is Leoncoeur's Hyppogryph which is minute by the standards of modern monstrous mounts.

Yes, I can see why GW would perhaps want to shift them off the board or relaunch them with new concepts. Yet there are characters who've died that I can't account for with that: Volkmar received a new model two years ago and whilst Thorek and his Anvil Of Doom are old you'd think they'd want to keep the thing around to make a fantastic new centrepiece model someday.

So what I'm saying is that these are not totally cynical deaths motivated by cutting outdated product from the webstore. Some may serve that purpose, might even have been written in for that very reason, but there are others which appear to exist for purely creative reasons. It's a good sign, I feel.

Which all brings us the upcoming Gotrek & Felix novel Kinslayer, which promises to be “Book One of the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson” and I only have this to say on the subject:

Please, Black Library, please kill him! I like the Gotrek & Felix novels as much as the next fan but this series needs to end. I remember the scene in Shamanslayer where Nathan Long was clearly angling to kill Gotrek and it would have been a fantastic scene, it was so well set up to serve all the characters perfectly. Frankly, the odds that any other death would match up is slim but the time has come to bite the damn bullet and put this franchise to sleep especially as by this point the series timeline is so screwed up in relation to the rest of the Warhammer world.

Gotrek's death is, actually, something to look forward to and since he is a fictional character with a twenty year time jump in his story he can prance forever through the Elysian fields of short stories and nostalgia novels if you so wish.

I am not one to cry “cash grab” at Games Workshop because I'm an adult with some understanding of economics but I do have a problem with marketing through false hope and if I'm promised doom I expect some bloody doom. 

The End Times: Equal opportunity inspiration

(Spoilers here up to the Battle of Skull Chasm section of Nagash Book I)

One thing I greatly appreciate about the way Nagash Book I is written is how none of the armies involved look like chumps. I've just passed the halfway mark and so far Nagash and his various minions have gone into battle against Bretonnia, Skaven, High Elves, Dwarfs, Night Goblins and more I've probably forgotten. All of this is to built up the Undead Legion and the various Mortarch's leading it but at no point does the opposition end up looking like idiots.

It's an easy temptation to fall into. You're marketing a particular faction, there's a natural desire to make them look great and this can spill over into making everyone else look like pushovers before their awesome might. The last Tau Empire book was quite bad for that, bigging up the Tau at the expense of making the Imperium look weak. It's not just unsatisfying if you happen to be an Imperial player, its dramatically unsatisfying. If the army can just sweep their enemies aside then what's the point of the fight?

We're back to Superman again, really. Peril is a generator of drama, invincibility is not.

This book is Nagash's day in the sun (sorry) but at no point does it make the forces the Undead Legion are fighting look like anything other than genuine threats. The undead will win because this is not only their book but the opening phase of The End Times so naturally the bad guys have to sweep the board.

To take an example: there's a section where Neferata and her Lahmian army fight Night Goblins. Neferata has a huge undead horde including her closest vampire handmaidens, ghouls, Tomb Guard and Neferata herself: the oldest vampire in existence. Her opposition are a mismatched collection of Goblin tribes displaced by her advancing army as she passes through the World's Edge Mountains.

This could easily have been a joke. The first vampire and her handmaidens versus a bunch of short, green, mushroom addicted cowards. Instead the chapter is a pacey little number that sets up the Goblin Warboss as a genuine threat who sets an ambush Neferata walks into through pure arrogance. It was a nice read and from a business point of view it might make people think about doing a Goblin army which is no bad thing because Goblin armies are ridiculously fun.

Actually, there's an earlier chapter where Mannfred Von Carstein takes an army into the Under-Empire and fights some Skaven, a chapter that made me want to dust off my old Skaven army before I remembered I'd actually sold it a few years ago.

(And of course there are the Bretonnia chapters which make me more determined than ever to work on that project, as much as the heraldry makes me want to tear my hair out in frustration every time I notice a difference between the two devices on one side of a knight. I do try to temper my perfectionism but with Bretonnia I find it hard.)

One of the main reasons this book exists, I feel, is to provide inspiration. There are a lot of pages given over to short potted backgrounds of individual characters and units involved in the battles. Any little bit of background can provide inspiration: my Tomb Kings army is based around a character who got a comedy box-out in their Army Book and a single line describing a “Legion of Legend” called the Zandri Blackshields. My first Bretonnia army was based on a name and a heraldry design from the Army Book's colour section.

My only problem, and it is far from unique, is keeping the same inspiration for any decent length of time. I've worked out about three different army lists since starting this book (Bretonnia, Skaven and a Lahmian themed Undead Legion, as it happens). I just have to remember that right now my Tomb Kings take priority.

The End Times: I feel like you've just killed an old friend

(Okay, so I've totted up everything I want to discuss about the Nagash set and having got as far as page 125 it looks like this is going to be a theme week. Today: SPOILERS for the Twelfth Battle of La Maisontaal Abbey, so page 65-ish, and tomorrow we'll move on to other, less Bretonnian and consequently less interesting topics. Just kidding, this whole thing is fascinating).

How important was this character? He looks like THAT and
they still remade him in Finecast resin.

Let's talk about narrative collapse and Heinrich Kemmler.

I was fond of Heinrich Kemmler. Okay, the model had a very old school pose which lead me to know him as The Dodgy Watchseller Of Darkness but I rather liked him. I first encountered him in White Dwarf's Return Of The Lichemaster campaign where he was the villain for a fun little series of scenarios pitting him and his undead cohort against Bretonnians and Wood Elves as he plundered barrows near Athel Loren. My own Master Necromancer, Berenice Von Gallenberg, was very consciously designed with Kemmler as a template.

I especially loved that he was a villain with a sidekick: Krell, a Wight King who had been a Chaos Champion in life, bestowed on Kemmler by the Chaos Gods in exchange for his soul. Yes, being a Master Necromancer wasn't evil enough for Kemmler: he also sold his soul to Chaos. They were a fun little team and I was very pleased to see them back together when the Nagash book described the army Arkhan The Black was taking into Bretonnia.

Then, on page 65, Arkhan killed Kemmler.

Kemmler, by the way, is one of the oldest characters in Warhammer and he was introduced in the original Battle of La Maisontaal scenario, the very first narrative scenario written for the game. That's where he was killed, too, in the explosion that destroys the Abbey. Got to love a little circularity.

This is probably the point at which a lot of gamers start throwing their toys out of the pram that a character they love has been removed from the board. Not me. I loved it. I'll miss the greasy old bastard, as the title of the post over-dramatically suggests I have considerable affection for him, but I take it as a good sign.

If one of the oldest characters, created in the oldest scenario, meets his end here in The End Times that's a massive symbolic sacrifice. What we could be dealing with here is nothing less than a complete narrative collapse scenario for the Warhammer World: a threat not to the fictional world but the world of the fiction.

Time to declare a bias: I love narrative collapse stories! Part of this love is that the collapse has to be preventable but the cost of restoring order has to immense, traumatic and permanent in order for it to matter. Joss Whedon is probably the modern master of narrative collapse, just look at any Buffy season finale but my go to is Graduation Day. Buffy can save Angel's life, defeat Faith and survive the Mayor's Ascension but that's only possible if she pays the price for each of those victories: she saves Angel only for him to leave her; without Faith she returns to the loneliness of being the sole Chosen One; and she has to sacrifice the basic premise of the show, its high school setting, in order to take out the Mayor.

To bring this back to The End Times: in the opening stages of this collapse alone we've lost one of the game's oldest villains; countries have been destroyed; kings have fallen in battle; and there are more significant character deaths after the point I'm talking about.

And that's the collapse, we aren't anywhere close to seeing what the restoration of order is going to cost us.

This is a very exciting time to be playing Warhammer.