Origin Stories

or How It All Got Started

Hello, Everyone... or more realistically no one since this is a new blog about an already niche hobby.  Nonetheless for the sake of future back scrolling I will explain the whys of this venture a little bit.  I have enjoyed reading comic book and gaming blogs since they first became popular in the early aughts.  Having been a fan of the main blog for years, I wanted to participate in Dreadtober, a subsidiary collaborative modeling and painting project of the the awesome Mordian 7th blog.

The Mordian 7th author was gracious enough to include me in the project even though I didn't have anywhere to post updates of my dreadnought WIP.  However, the more I thought about it, I believed I had grokked the essential elements of all the blogs I have read and loved over the years.  I have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed 30 years of adventures in the highs and lows of comic books and miniature collecting.  Also, I am a super wordy person who enjoys the long way to tell a story, and now that my children are in elementary school for at least seven hours a day, the potential time to bore others with my tales of gaming and collecting via the magic of the tubes and wires of the Internet.





I love games of all kinds but especially tabletop war games.  I have been fascinated by them since I was a kindergartner, probably because my first step dad was very interested in historical war games.  This was in the early 80's so I have memories of a shelf full of those Avalon Hill boxed games, but the crowning achievement of his hobby ambition at that time was making a huge gaming table in the basement.

It was two old doors on sawhorses so it was probably at least 7' x 7' but from my 5 year old perspective it was bigger than my entire field of vision making it seem endless to my childhood imagination.  He painted the surface green and I think I remember that there was a blue strip painted across it to represent a river.  There were model train houses, fences, and hedgerows made from what I now know to be flock.  My step dad was playing some sort of civil war game, he had a truckload of 10mm blue and grey plastic civil war soldiers in various positions and battlefield rolls.  Like little green army men but civil war era and smaller in size.  They would be glued down in similar troop type groups to bases he made out of cardboard strips, which probably primed me for my love of Epic scale 40K, but I wouldn't learn about that great game until years later.

I was never old enough while he was still part of our family to learn the rules of the game he was using the table for, but after he and my mom divorced the game fell by the wayside and I had hours of fun playing with all those mono color civil war soldiers in all sorts of games of my own invention.  I even remember a wicker suitcase I used to carry them around in, until I lost them one at at time in the many different locations I played with them until some critical loss mass was reached and the few remaining were thrown away to make room for the new Christmas toys.  In spite of the short window of time he was my step dad, he did teach me how to play Risk, and the memories of the way a whole world could be encapsulated in a gaming table always had a hold on my imagination.

Flash forward to the summer of 1990 and my 13 year old self was always checking the clearance racks of my local comics and games stores for a good deal. I had been enjoying months old copies of Dragon magazines found on those shelves, I was hooked on the Dragonlance novels and peering into the world of D & D via TSR's in house magazine was fun.  Although I loved the articles on a range of subjects and games, I hadn't found a way to translate the love of the world of Dragonlance into a interactive experience via a game.  There were not enough kids in my neighborhood with an interest in D & D to be able to get a RPG group going and I realize in retrospect that even if I had, forcing everyone to play out my love of the Dragonlance sagas would have probably made me a terrible dungeonmaster.

However on that day the hand of fate steered me towards the fictional universe that has held my attention longer than anything other than the twin Stars (Wars and Trek) of my early childhood love of science fiction (well, really space opera, but I didn't understand the distinction then).  Waiting on the discount rack that day was my first issue of White Dwarf, number 122 (insert your own ominous debut music here).

I had no idea what the armour or the soldier on the cover was, but I knew I loved it.  It combined the coolest armour I had seen since Imperial Stormtroopers with heraldry in a style that was medieval but with images that were obviously outside those eurocentric origins.  Not that my 13 year old brain formulated an analysis that complicated, I'm pretty sure my reaction in the moment was the geek equivalent of the Tex Avery wolf eyes popping out of the front of my head.  I flipped through it briefly to ensure that the inside was as awesome as the cover and I was hooked.  In my pre-employment days my weekly spending money usually totaled $5 or less, so an eighty page magazine for less than $2 filled with enough fuel to launch hundreds of ooh I want to play that game daydreams was an incredible bang for my buck.

I poured over that issue and still own it today.  I quickly learned that WD often pulled a cover bait and switch to rival Silver Age DC Superman covers.  That is to say that inside the magazine there was very little coverage of anything related to the awesome cover illustration except for a few pictures in 'Eavy Metal.  There was one article about Chaos Terminators in Space Hulk and a short piece about 40K (Rogue Trader era) tactics, but absolutely nothing about "Captain of the Deathwing, Terminator Company of the Dark Angels" except an add for the forthcoming Deathwing supplement for Space Hulk.

It didn't matter, I devoured everything inside and started buying WD in whatever comic stores carried them.  I got the Deathwing supplement for Christmas that year (even though I didn't have Space Hulk) along with the Rogue Trader rule book and RTB01.  My 30 year love affair with Space Marines was beginning and the novella in the Deathwing rule book written by the proto Black Library ensured that the Dark Angels would always be my favourite chapter.  It would be 7-8 years before I started playing Dark Angels in earnest but that is a story for another post.

Wow, I knew I was a talkative person, but ten paragraphs to get to why I love war games, 40K, and Dark Angels in particular surprised even me.  Now that we have a start, I can just post pictures about models I'm painting with only occasional long form digressions on the history of my hobby love.

I will close with a picture from that first WD that hooked me forever into seeking out the Dark Angels and still frequently informs what I aspire to with my own painting 30 years later.  Thanks for reading, just in case anyone does :-)