Death Korps of Krieg Grenadier Squad

 I bought these guys in 2007.  I only know that because I know I bought them in the middle of my Iraq deployment.  I naturally would have liked a whole army of them.  Such a venture was too expensive for me, but I allowed myself one squad for my Inquisition army, which consisted of a weird and wild retinue of arco-flagellants, Sisters of Battle, half man, half machine retainers and converted armored vehicles.  For some time they made up the bodyguard of my Inquisitor, the dreaded Simion Phang.  

My choice of models made for a pretty wonderful looking collection, and even my conversion work wasn't too bad, but my painting wasn't there yet.  Probably didn't help that I was trying to paint in a tent in Iraq with lousy light and crummy gear.  In the end I wasn't happy with the army and I never finished it.  There are a lot of great miniatures still sitting in boxes wondering why I abandoned them.  I have a converted Rhino which the guys used to ride around in somewhere, too.  I shall have to dig that out and paint it.

I pulled this sinister looking bunch out of a drawer a few days ago where they'd been sitting almost forgotten for about a decade and decided that they didn't look too bad, they just needed some re-basing and a little touching up, so here they are, Big Sarge out front, leading the assault...

These really are marvelously menacing and characterful models, with their blend of Dystopian Sci Fi and WW 1 trench warfare elements...

...I can almost forgive them for being plastic.  They lack the goofiness of my more regular Rogue Trader stuff, though.  I never made an effort to see if they would fit in with my Rogue Trader Imperial Guard guys.  Maybe they could be a squad of elite shock troops or something.

Flame thrower guy.

The Grenadiers assault through the cactus forest...Space Orks beware!

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...