Bashing some champions for the Genestealer Cult

prime Nihei right here

 

I am not the biggest fan of the way the Genestealer Cult is portrayed in miniatures in the 40k range. I like the idea of workers and civilians tricked into joining a weird religion under the pretense of freedom but I don't think the models always sell that. The suits and a few of the standalone characters are cool, but the mutations feel very safe. Everyone gets Star Trek alien makeup and maybe a third arm, a really fucked up face if you're lucky. Basically, it's neither weird enough nor creepy enough for my taste.So let's depart from the original look of the cult to make some weirdos.  

Nihei's character work in Biomega

In the last article I mentioned the work of Tsutomu Nihei as a big inspiration for this project. Like a lot of people I know, I first came into contact with Nihei's work through BLAME!. And like a lot of people I know, the fascination was pretty much immediate. While the architecture in Nihei's work is the thing that I see brought up most often (and it is worth bringing up to be fair), the character design is what interests me here. It feels like Moëbius by way of David Cronenberg I guess, a very refined and elegant sort of body horror. After finishing Biomega, I was itching to try to capture that vibe as well. Necromunda is the go to scifi skirmish at my LGS, and the weird grungy megastructure is a perfect setting for this project. Pretty quickly a few core ideas for the genestealer cult higher ups emerged, and today I'm breaking down two of the kitbashes.

The first champion I'm showing off today, was originally a skaven hero I picked up on the cheap because the sprue melted in the heat. I'm not joking, here it is :

I never want to hear brits complain about the heat again

The base model here is great. The gross mutated flesh fits right in and the little grafted helper is incredible character detail. However, having melted; this was a complete pain to put together. While the two main pieces fit together decently well, the melt caused a ton of issues afterwards. After a rough assembly, the first step was to "derat" the model (as, to remove the parts that are rat related). The Master Moulder has some little rats at his little rat feet, so they had to go (they are preserved in the bits box, as the little rats are very cute). They were replaced with some fresh new kicks from the barbgaunts kit. I tried to preserve a good bit of the old robe when cutting the plastic to fit the new feet, which would save time resculpting it later.

The next distinctively skaven feature was the fur, so I gave the little guy a complete shave. I kept the rat on his hunched back and sculpted some tyranid adjacent carapace on him. This was part laziness, not wanting to resculpt the flesh after cutting it off, and part fondness for the cute little guy. At this stage I also did a quick putty pass to hide any ugly cut and blend in some parts.

The head was... a bit of a process. I knew what I wanted for the little rat head that's grafted on to the original model but the moulder itself was a bit of a mystery. And that's when the listbuilding saved me. This champion was going to hold a pistol in one hand, and I wanted something tall in the other to break up the ball shape the silhouette was in at this stage. The original model does this quite well I think, but I wasn't super fond of the mancatcher bit. What this meant was that there was only lone spot left for a heavier gun : the head. In my list this will probably be a grenade launcher but I purposefully went with something a little more ambiguous. See, when I have leftover putty at the end of a sculpting session, I like to make little cubes with it. The main character's gun in BLAME! also happens to be very rectangular, and ends in a really cool shape, so I grabbed one of my milliput cubes and engraved in the design.

 

After the head was attached with a brass rod and some putty, a ways from the body, once again to break the silhouette, it still felt like it was missing something. Nihei tends to use disarticulation, and unnatural separations of organic shapes to sell a lot of his horror. And so, inspired by him and Weirdingsway's recent Flames of Orion models, I put some split faces on the cube.

Like I mentioned before, the face of the little rat was a shoe-in. I used one of the spare heads from the Escher gang kit, shaved a bit of the back and pinned it to the arm piece. Once again the uncanny contrast between the beautiful face here and the grotesque monstrosity is a Nihei classic I am happy to riff on. This was probably the worst fitting bit of the whole build, the warping was pretty bad and it left a large gap, which meant resculpting the stitches from the original model. The barrel of the gun was completely bent on the sprue and after applying some heat to try and bend it back gently, it just... sort of fell off. Not really even snapped, just kind of gave up being attached to the rest of the weapon. After a bit of drilling I ended up with something that is fittingly a little more sci-fi, though I'm not completely convinced and might change it for something more square.

Now for the other arm, this is simply a Krieg lance with the explosive cut off and replaced with a banner topper made from a tyranid and human skull melded with putty. 

The final step, and final homage to Nihei was adding a ton of cables between the heads and the body. I bought one of those cable making things recently and it's dangerously fun to use. As usual with my kitbashes, I see a few things I feel like changing now that I've sat with the model for a while. It feels like everytime I post something "done", I have to add the caveat that it's only 95% of the way there, and this one is no different. 

 

I started from the complete opposite end for the other model. I had a bit I really wanted to use as a head, and pretty much nothing else concrete. My only idea besides the head (which you'll need to wait to see), was to build a figure with a more "contained" mutation, something more in line with the base gangers. My collection of scifi bits is fairly limited compared to my fantasy pile. Aside from some Necromunda stuff, bits I traded and some T'au and Necrons that were reserved for their own projects, pretty much everything in my bits box is Fantasy oriented. So, knowing I'd probably need to pick up something for this model I went with a box of Arbites from Kill Team. If this gang wasn't designed to be entered into Armies on Parade, I would have probably opted for something from Wargames Atlantic or a weird pull from my bin of weird minis. This was the only brand new purchase for this project and I'm not mad about it. The designs here are quite nice, and the options mean it's good fodder for bashing.

 

This body was the natural choice for me, it's got a really cool contrapposto-ish pose and the planned head was a great fit. Now, unfortunately, this kit has some of the worst mold lines I've seen on something made by GW. They are massive, pass over detail that is very annoying to cleanup and very visible areas. Might have been my copy, but this felt like a kit from the early 2000s rather than two years ago.

Anyway, with what little patience I had left, I installed some armature wire to sculpt a big mutant right arm on the figure. I could have probably found an appropriate bit, but for the sake of my sanity, I opted not to spend more time cutting and sanding plastic. The wire was covered with putty so future layers could adhere better, and a hand armature was added at the extremity. Once that was dry the hand was coated in super glue, just to make sure it was extra safe in place. The hand is posed as if it was offering something to the viewer. I love that type of pose, it feels like it conveys a lot more than just "hand with gun", and here, I think it actually hits the disturbing vibe I was aiming for.

I blobbed the basic shapes on and looked for an arm I liked in there. Since this was the main body
horror feature of this champion, I was not too bothered about making it anatomically accurate. At that point I felt like it was missing something, so I returned to my little cubes. While they started as just little cubes of spare putty, I think they're an interesting narrative hook. The cubes might be machine parts growing out of the members of the gang, or implanted to either impede the tyranid corruption or speed it up, or even attempt to control it. In the final shot you'll see I added a tiny cube in the palm, continuing the idea that he's offering something. I don't really know what the cube does but it doesn't look fun.  The rest of the arm was completed with a round of putty for the hand and a doll-like joint on the elbow. And now here's the finished bash :

 

Yes I wanted to give him a TV head from the get go, long live the new flesh. I think in retrospect this one drifted a little from the Nihei vibe, and I've accidentally stumbled on something more like Plastiboo's scifi work, the weird big techno organic arm, the rounded shapes, it's not quite Godhusk but it reminds me of his Lain art, and other cyberpunk teenagers with electric tulpas and... ah fuck I've just done Akira again haven't I ?