Art director John Blanche didn’t get me into Warhammer – that accolade goes to Peter Jackson and the Perry brothers for Games Workshop’s movie tie-in Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game – but he pulled me deeper. I collected huge armies and played weekend-long battles, but I was purely in the hobby to stomp my friends. I was the ideal teenage collector, in the eyes of Games Workshop if not my mum, in that I just wanted more stuff. I bought it, I poured superglue on it, slapped three colours onto vaguely appropriate places, and min-maxed my way to victory.
I took some time away from the hobby when I discovered beer, but got back into it when I went to university and discovered John Blanche. Blanche’s work had been peppered through my teenage hobby, but I usually skipped past all his double-page paintings of battles and Emperors to get to the rules to build my army. It speaks volumes to his iconic style, though, that I instantly recognised it as I returned to the fold despite my childhood ignorance. And it speaks even louder that he immediately inspired me to build a Dark Mechanicus army.
Enough about me, though. People decades older than I grew up with Blanche’s artwork, and his unique style utilising oils and inks on paintings and miniatures alike. Even if you somehow haven’t heard his name, you’ll recognise his art from the covers of rulebooks and some of the most iconic scenes in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. He shaped the grimdark style of 40k arguably more than any other, and designed the blueprint for much of the art we see today.
Blanche retiring is a big deal. His art will live on through the Blanchitsu school of miniature painting that he pioneered, as well as blogs like Gothic Punk that document and archive his work, much of which was only ever released physically in White Dwarf magazines. And what’s he doing with his retirement? He’s converting and painting female marines.
The marine in question is from Trench Crusade, a crowdfunded system that blends WW1 warfare with a grimdark aesthetic. Of course, Blanche has added a few GW bits to convert the miniature to his signature style, like the pouches you can see clearly. And then he’s painted it in his iconic, ink-based method.
The fact that he’s chosen a female marine as his first non-GW model to build and paint has been quite controversial, despite the fact that the mini is neither a GW product nor an alternative Space Marine. This stems from right-wing hobby ‘purists’ saying that all Space Marines are male, when the lore clearly states that anyone who wishes to become a Space Marine goes through complex and traumatic biological processes, rendering them genderless by the end. If you’re thinking that this sounds quite a lot like many trans experiences, you’d be right, but the purists have little to no reading comprehension, and therefore this makes all Space Marines men, apparently.
How this culture war debate reached John Blanche’s non-Games Workshop not-Space Marine, I don’t know. But it has, and now the Warhammer legend is mired in a lengthy debate that shuns the truth and sends his fantastical, creative, and ultimately make-believe miniatures onto the frontlines of a culture war that I’m sure he’s weary of. John Blanche is a creative genius, a man who made magic with paints and oils at a time when his company produced a pitiful number of pigments. His work still stands up today, but it was nothing short of miraculous back in the day, and he deserves to enjoy his retirement in peace. If all that is required is for us to shut up, then that’s the least we can do.