John Blanche - 1948 - 2026

 

Sword of the Demon - John Blanche

Sad to hear of the passing of John Blanche last week. 

Truly one of the greats in the Fantay Art world and a shaper of hobby and tabletop gaming culture and of fantasy and Sci-fi art the world over. An inspiration to millions; gamers, hobbyists and artists alike. A damn good legacy and one which stretches far beyond his GW work.

All of John's enormous wealth of artwork and modelling is well known to all, but I thought I'd share where I first saw John's work. 

This was with the cover of Fantasy novel 'Sword of the Demon' by Richard Lupoff published back in 1976. I was drawn to the book by the cover naturally and believe this was one of John's first professional pieces and before being employed by GW. Don't remember much about the book but the cover has always stayed with me.

The piece has all the hallmarks of John's work with the attention to detail and colour palette that has entralled and captivated his audience's to this day, and will continue to do so.

Will be missed.

The Army of King Matthias (and other stories)

These three rather splendid books dropped through my letter box the other day.

The three titles; The Army of King Matthias 1458 - 1526, Warriors of the Hungarian Frontier 1526 - 1686 and Hungarian Military Flags are all by the Hungarian graphic artist Gyozo Somogyi.

I caught up with these titles from a book review in the latest issue Hobilar, the Journal of the Lance and Longbow society which reviewed the first title but went on to point out where these Hungarian publications could be purchased, both from Military Matters but also from bookline.hu (the Hungarian version of Amazon apparently) the later being where I picked the titles up from. They were ordered and received within a week, so definitely no complaints on the service.

The three volumes I picked up (there are several more from the same author who specializes in Hungarian Military History from earliest times right up to the current day) are all each full of illustrations with only an introductory page of text on the background history of the chosen title in both English and Hungarian and the rest of the volumes full of plates only with captions, again in English and Hungarian.

I thoroughly recommend these titles for source material for the period and locale and a search on Google for Images of Gyozo Somogyi's work will give you a good taste of his other work available.

Sisters do it Digitally

I note from the GW and Black Library Websites that they are soon to release (19th Oct) the new Codex: Adepta Sororitas (Sisters of Battle to you and me) for 40K.

The decidedly 'Marvelesque' Cover
(Can u call it a cover if it's digital?)

Being a collector of this army for sometime (I've even had a couple of games with the army over the years too), I had a look at this as it peeked my interest, not only as I have a passing interest in using the army again but also cause the released 5th Ed lists serialized in White Dwarf a couple of years ago were fairly poor, so I thought this might be an improvement.

I quickly noted that this was an ebook only release. So digital but no dead tree versions, hmmm.

A Nun with a Gun

I don't have a big problem with this as I've recently embraced the ebook revolution, but what is of interest was that this is synonymous of a bigger move, away from hard copy to a digital only theme that seems to be building generally in publishing and more particularly in gaming. Perhaps it is because of the general low volume of gaming publishing that is pushing this move, or is it that us as customers are more agreeable to the digital medium.

I can see that the army is probably low sales comparatively, but at least the lower overhead option of supporting the still available (but alas un-added to) range of figures.

The pretty chunky price tag for a digital version of £19.99, for a 120 pages ish did seem a bit steep though.

I did note that GW's (Black Library) catalogue of digital and digital only products is pretty extensive, surprisingly so. Even if some of the titles are a bit esoteric to say the least, but I'm not one to gain say that.

I'll no doubt pick it up sometime probably at the same time I get around to getting the new Eldar Codex along with the Iyanden Sourcebook. Ouch, no change from £60 for some intangibles.