The Emporer's Lash: Inquisitor Phang's Arco-Flagellants

 Although I always loved Rick Priestly's vision of the 40k universe, and often read the 40k rulebooks and sourcebooks just for entertainment, I was never really inspired by the 2nd and 3rd edition figures and game.  They just didn't work for me.  Post Rogue Trader, I tuned out 40k for quite a few years but somewhere around 2007/2008 I began to notice things going on in White Dwarf that piqued my interest, most notably, the Witch Hunters armies that began to appear here and there throughout the magazine.

 The delightfully creepy recipe for the Witch Hunters army included such delectable ingredients as psychotic violence, Religious fanaticism and kinky sex, simmered together slowly over a low flame of raw angst.  Perfect.  Better yet, I could see that there was a lot of potential in this army for reaching out to old 80's Citadel minis and even other manufacturers, a flexibility I appreciated.  Still, I never did anything about it other than daydream.  Until Iraq.

Whilst in Iraq I rediscovered 40k, now in it's fourth edition, with its splendid new artwork and a bounty of interesting new models.  Best of all, I found that, during this time, GW offered a vast line of BITS!  TONS of them, and that you could order almost any component Citadel had ever manufactured to customize your army.  Breaking point.  I started building a Witch Hunters army in the shadowy corner of the Squad tent which, troll-like,  I inhabited at that time.

I had a lot of fun putting this squad together...

I can't help but love the concept of the Arco-Flagellants...mindless, Tasmanian Devil-like Cyborgs, spinning dementedly around the table-top like Goblin fanatics...

 Hobbled this one together out of a Warhammer Fantasy Ghoul, some Dark Eldar bike chains and spikes carved off a resin sprue...

 Gladiator weapons bits added some spice to some of the original figures...they were nice, but I wanted to put them over the top and into crazy territory...

Wonderful animation to some of these sculpts...Also like the turbine-like machinery added to some of their heads and backs...

Still have some work to do on most of the other Witch Hunter squads I started for this army...I still look forward to a campaign in which Inquisitor Phang's Probe-in-Force take on a horde of mutants kit-bashed out of plastic Wahammer fantasy Zombies and Ghouls, led by the adepts of a vile Nurgle cult...stay tuned, dear friends...