Back in June when I reviewed the new plastic Meganobs I said that the first Warhammer 40k miniature I ever painted was one of the old metal Meganobs but I couldn’t find him to upload a picture. Well, rummaging around at the back of the shelf, where older and less well painted/converted miniatures are slowly pushed back to linger in dusty shame, I spotted him. And you know what? I still love him. My painting may have improved a little since then, and the new Meganobs may be bigger and meaner than their elderly (and heavy) metal counterparts but he’s still as tough and angry as ever.
I admit I was a little torn between leaving him alone as a sort of historic artefact and touching his paint up a little so that he was no longer left behind by the march of progress. In the end I compromised. Somewhere along the line he must have come off worst in a fight (unthinkable I know) – the stick bomb launcher on his arm had fallen off and his metal gob was shaking around like a loose tooth so he needed some kind of TLC. As I was doing this anyway I decided to put him on a new base as well.
Anyway, here he is, ready to show those plastic whipper-snappers a thing or two.
Convert or Die 
September 11th, 2014 at 11:24 pm
I’m sure the plastic ones are easier to build, but this guy is exactly what I expect an unpleasant and deranged ork to look like. I love the gritty colors you chose, nice work!
September 13th, 2014 at 11:34 am
Cheers! Often wish I’d kept that really gritty, grimy look to my orks when I painted the rest of the collection. I’m going back over them all and touching up the paint work and, in the process, trying to bring back some of that grubby realism. No criticism intended of other people’s miniatures but to my mind an ork shouldn’t be all clean, bright colours and sharp highlights. He should be filthy, all chipped paint, rust and blood-stains. People often focus on the side of the orks that is comical and silly, and of course I love that element to them, but I try not to overlook that they are also horribly brutish and violent. The slapstick element only works when it’s married to that brutality. There’s nothing funny about an ork when he’s standing on your face, but equally if that potential was removed the farcical aspect would be a lot less appealing. In the end the orks exist as a component of the 40k universe and all the grubby madness that entails. If they’re too clean then they seem out of place. It says a lot about a place if the guy in the sharpest duds is an ork!
I’m looking forward to seeing what the new plastic kit can do though, I’m sure they can be made even meaner with a little effort, plus I’m convinced I can get a Warboss and some gun servitors out of that box if I put my mind to it!
September 12th, 2014 at 8:45 am
Old is nearly always better 🙂 Nice paint job.
September 13th, 2014 at 11:42 am
Thanks 🙂 I know what you mean, and I (partly) agree. I remember looking in the window of my local GW just being amazed by these hulking green aliens in their rusty armour. In part I know it’s just nostalgia (which is often regarded as a dirty word but really shouldn’t be). It’s the same with lots of things. The first few albums I bought I went out and spent money on them, then sat on the bus home looking through the album artwork, then I listened to it to death. I wouldn’t trade that for the broad availability of music we have nowadays, nor would I want to go back to glitchy computer games with awful graphics (although I remember how smooth and well rendered I thought they were without modern standards to compare them with). I certainly wouldn’t want to see a return to metal miniatures when modern standards are (generally – not always!) so high. However it’d sadden me if the ‘soul’ of the game that seemed so vibrant to me then was to be lost. No matter how high standards of sculpting become if I no longer felt that vibrancy I’d stop bothering to paint miniatures. Equally so long as I still feel that passion I’ll paint on rocks in a post-nuclear wasteland if I have to. Luckily custodianship of that ‘soul’ doesn’t lie with GW or any other external source, but with the hobbyists themselves, the people who still feel that passion that got all of us to pick up miniatures in the first place. It only takes a quick look around on forums and blogs like these to prove that this soul is alive and well.
The other nice thing is that, thanks to the Internet, old miniatures don’t go away completely; they just get rarer over time. This way we can have new and old side by side – and that makes me happy (why shouldn’t we have our cake and eat it?)!
November 21st, 2016 at 4:31 pm
[…] Orks I’ll admit to a real fondness for their older metal predecessors as well. Indeed the very first Games Workshop miniature I painted, way back when, was an Ork, one of the old meganobs – and indeed it is high time he was […]
December 6th, 2016 at 8:21 am
[…] first Ork (and indeed the first Games Workshop miniature) I ever painted was a Meganob. At the time I knew next to nothing about the setting and picked the model based purely on its […]