Merry Mercmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone! Reconnecting with the miniature painting community in the last few weeks has been medicine for me. So thanks for all the greetings and encouragements. I truly enjoy each comment all of you leave behind when you come to visit. I hope you are all staying safe and finding ways to make the most out of this wounded holiday season.

I want to end 2020 on a high note, so here's one of my favourite Citadel miniatures of all time: the Warhammer 40K mercenary "Old World Jack." His grim expression of dread and his lively sense of movement make a compelling contrast. Plus his armour is an early ancestor of the beaky space marine armour that discloses how influential 2000 AD was on Citadel's visual style: those boots and knee-pads are right out of Judge Dredd:

Next is "Catachan Luke." He's named after the jungle planet Catachan, which is mentioned in the Rogue Trader rulebook as the deadliest of hostile "death worlds". But if Catachan is a mythic version of Vietnam, Luke is clearly patterned off a US infantryman, complete with an M16:

I don't know about you, but if I was going to spend my hard-earned money on a heavily armed mercenary, I would not hire a man who goes by the name "Spaced-Dout Sam." Jesus, Sam -- pull yourself together.

And finally we have "Mad Morris." Like many of the RT7 mercenaries, this model lived a double life as an Imperial Guardsman. But that, of course, is quite appropriate, since it is easy to imagine many of the more sociopathic Guardsmen deserting the service, repainting their equipment, and taking up life as a gun-for-hire:

Thanks for coming with me on this tour of the Rogue Trader mercenaries. In case you missed the earlier episodes, here are the first, second and third posts I wrote about the RT7 range of miniatures.

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I will leave you with one final piece of great personal news. Mrs. Oldhammer-in-Toronto and I adopted a retired racing greyhound. We had been thinking of getting a pooch for many months. She wanted a medium-sized dog and I wanted a small dog, so we compromised and got an extremely large dog. Seriously - he is so big, when he lays down (which is most of time time) he looks like there's a dead deer lying around my house. "Utopia" came to us from the racetrack on Wheeling Island, West Virginia, via the extremely caring and professional foster care at Gillian's Greyhound Adoption. 

I can assure my reading public that his is a very good boy.