I’m selling some Epic Squats on eBay at the moment, and I thought hey . . . I have a wargaming blog. I can cross-promote.
The lot ends in a few days. I want to cut down on my old stuff to make room for better organization, so some more old GW stuff and some historical and Privateer Press things will be going under the virtual hammer soon too. I don’t feel good when I have too many objects around that I never use.
Hopefully these guys will go to a good home. Squats get a bad rap these days for being silly, and I sometimes wonder why I liked them at all when I was a boy. Sourcing this old Rogue Trader artwork has reminded me. The Squats had a hard-headed, no-nonsense soldier-of-fortune vibe that the psychotic, brainwashed Space Marines and sacrificial Imperial Guard couldn’t match.
And everything was silly back then – the Orks are just as dumb and childish an idea as the Squats thank you very much. Rogue Trader was a product of its time. The modern grimdark 40k universe that people applaud so much for its depth is going to look pretty silly itself in twenty years, I guarantee.
So yeah, check out my auction if you like. Unfortunately I used one of the exo-armoured guys as a banner-top for my Dwarfs in high school. He’s the only thing missing from the original box.
October 25th, 2011 at 10:44 pm
Squats don’t exist, they were expunged from the Imperium… By the Emperor… YOU’RE A HERETIC!!!!!
lol
I still have my dads Squats kicking around somewhere.
October 25th, 2011 at 11:41 pm
For me the modern doesn’t even have that depth it’s supposed to, and looks rather silly already. I won’t say things were done better in the older days in every way, but I do think they were in one very important way, in assuming the reader was looking at the nuts and bolts more, going under the skin, that the reader was a critical reader not only in being critical, but in wanting to take the thing apart and understand it, rework it.
October 26th, 2011 at 7:11 am
I was a heretic. Now I’m doing my duty and selling them out
@Porky, looking back I agree with you. The only real depth it has is the cheap depth that dark anti-heroism lends to things. It’s a comic book depth.
So really it’s not 40k that’s changed in tone, it’s comic books. Back in the 80s, 40k got its manic, apocalyptic tone from comics (like 2000AD), and now it looks to me like it just has the gritty and dark tone of modern comics and video games.
And you’re absolutely right I think. Modern 40k definitely has no assumption of a critical readership.