Friday 29 November 2013

Great War of the Worlds..Minifigs style...updates


Dave at Caliver has sneaked some more excellent releases into the Martian SF range......these are well sculpted pieces that, to me, have a myriad of uses...I can actually see some of the Martians entering service as a fantasy pirate warband......more purchases on the way! This Martian wave is more human like than the 80's Valley of the Four Winds Swamp Lords so those early figures would be the cannon fodder sent in early to absorb the hits. Maybe some lobotomised human infantry would be a good idea.....semi naked troops controlled by a transmitter attached to the cerebral cortex......

MART50 Martian Heatgunner


MART61 Martian Standing with early pattern Stun Rifle 


MART62 Martian Advancing with Earth-pattern Stun Rifle


MART63 Martian Firing late Earth-pattern Stun Rifle 


GWW1 British Pankhurst Battalion Officer


and the painted version off Minifigs site....


GWW2 British Pankhurst Battalion Infantrywoman Advancing

just the painted version so far....


GWW3 British Pankhurst Battalion Standard Bearer with cast flag









GWW4 British Pankhurst Battalion Infantrywoman Firing


GWW50 Martian Hunter Officer


GWW51 Martian Hunter Firing (I've actually cut the bayonets off these 2 since these pics were taken)


GWW Martian Hunter Advancing


GWWM1 Martian Drone..finally pinned and based.....


The range is all available here...


tell them I sent you :)

I have also pulled out a few old unfinished Vikings..as can be seen they have been gathering dust for a while......Foundry and Citadel sculpts.....size variation is never an issue for me as people are different sizes in the real world....

once completed to go with the rest of the guys..


Any comments or trades - enquiries@deartonyblair.co.uk

Monday 25 November 2013

Hand operation so little going on.....


General anaesthetic on Thursday and hopefully getting rid of Dupuytren's nodules on my right hand..... bit of an old age thing unfortunately.... buggers up guitar playing and holding a beer securely....


So....not much of a post beyond some nice adverts from some old ('76/'77) ads from Little Wars Magazine..the early historical TSR magazine to accompany The Dragon mag.....





Wednesday 20 November 2013

Great War of the Worlds..Minifigs style...


“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own” 

H G Wells published his work 'War of the Worlds' in 1898...a time of great colonial powers already ensconced around the globe, some on the rise and some on the wane... Minifigs have taken the idea and had Gary Morley and Andrew Ellis sculpt the beginnings of what, hopefully, will become a sizeable range allowing us to re-enact scenes similar to those conjured up by Mr Wells... the sculpts are based on the earlier Valley of the Four Winds Swamp Lords who were obviously the initial wave planted years before where the Martian advanced science and technology have never arrived...

MART1 Greater Martian Warlord


MART2 Greater Martian Close Combat Warriors (3 versions)




Group shot...supplied as MART3


MART50 Martian Heatgunner

GWW1 British Pankhurst Battalion Officer

GWW2 British Pankhurst Battalion Infantrywoman Advancing

GWW3 British Pankhurst Battalion Standard Bearer with cast flag

GWW4 British Pankhurst Battalion Infantrywoman advancing

GWW50 Martian Hunter Officer

GWW51 Martian Hunter Firing

GWW Martian Hunter Advancing

Awaiting copies of these guys...

GWW53 Martian Hunter with Edison-Farnsworth Disintegration Ray on Tripod




GWWM1 Martian Drone




Group Shot with an unsuspecting Artizan Designs waiter... shows how huge these guys are....


 Shot including one of the old VFW Swamp Lords... 5 of which have been re-released by Minifigs here



The range is in the Minifigs shop here. If you do mozey on over to the site and get involved, please let them know where you got the message and point out that we need the rest of the Swamp Lords released... nb Dave has told me that he doesn't have all the molds although seems to have the masters, all of which have been chromed to protect them from oxidisation etc  - apparently Neville Dickinson was paranoid about this as the Ral Partha masters had started to suffer... also, the sales from releasing the VFW do not currently justify making up more molds. Buy some and that could change!


Sunday 17 November 2013

Shades of the 80s.....Grenadier AD&D Lizardmen re-released.....


The Italian stallions Mirliton have continued their re-releasing strategy of old Grenadier ranges and have now hit the AD&D figures - just the lizardmen so far but we live in hope. 

The original (104 Lizardmen)


and the new.............


Available here

This was an incredible range at the time and so well marketed. Pics of the blisters below, many taken off ebay over time so no details of the original owners, apologies and all kudos to them all. Many of these examples were signed by the sculptor Andrew Chernak.....I so wish I'd bid on them....

101 Kakshasa




102 Bugbears


103 Orcs



104 Lizardmen


105 Djinn & Efreet



106 Driders


107 Umber Hulk & Zorn


108 Goblins


109 Basilisk & Cockatrice



110 Golems


111 Kobolds


112 Wererats



113 Elementals 1


114 Elementals 2


115 Adventurers


116 Giants


4 more packs were listed on the rear of the packs but do not appear to have been released;

117 Undead
118 Lycanthropes
119 Centaurs
120 Pegasus & Unicorn

Grenadier lost the AD&D licence in late 1982 and many sculpts jumped into other lines barring the ones that were specifically AD&D creatures.....

I was in the States back in 1982 and ordered 3 of these blisters from a mall hobby shop in Pheonix, Arizona. They only had the lizardmen and the bugbears in stock so I took them with me along with 2 copies of the Tom Meier Ral Partha  Imperial Dragon......still my fave dragon of all time.  Unfortunately the blisters I ordered never turned up back in blighty....I often wonder if they were ever posted. I didn't even take an address for the place. Trust now needs to be earned.......32 years on it still rankles..... 

 As usual contact me on enquiries@deartonyblair.co.uk