Not just dead - BUCKY DEAD!

In my previous post about working on Flames of War models, I related the difficult time I had working on such a small scale with my Red Skull conversion and how I wasn’t going to attempt any more conversions for Flames of War.


Which brings me to my Baron Zemo conversion.


While the Red Skull is fairly well known as a villain, the good baron may need more of an introduction. Zemo first appeared way back in Avengers #4 (1964) as a Nazi scientist who had fought Captain America and Bucky during World War II and escaped to South America at the war’s end, where he returns in the present day to combat the Captain once more. Zemo’s claim to fame was that he was responsible for the death of Captain America’s partner, Bucky, and caused the Captain to become frozen in ice in the North Atlantic and in suspended animation until he was found and revived in the present day by the Avengers.




With me so far? Good.


Now any comic book fan worth his salt knows that nobody stays dead in comic books. The title of this post, ‘Bucky Dead’ is a comic geek’s term for a state of permanent death in comics, since Bucky had stayed dead for over 40 years. When someone was Bucky Dead, they weren’t going to be coming back. For instance, everyone had always thought Norman Osborn (the original Green Goblin) was Bucky Dead, since he stayed dead for a good 25+ years, before crappy writers and editors, who weren’t happy with how much they had already buried the Spiderman series with the god-awful ‘Clone Saga’ in the late 90’s, decided to bring poor Norman back from the dead.

After Norman Osborn was ‘unkilled’ in comics, it was down to just Bucky, Uncle Ben (no, not the guy on the rice box, the guy who was Spiderman’s uncle, who was killed by the burglar who Spiderman had let esca – you know what, if you don’t know this one, you’re probably not enough of a geek to be reading this blog to begin with), and Jason Todd, the second Robin, who was killed by the Joker in the late 80’s. Interesting thing about JT’s death was that it was the result of a fan poll. Jason beaten to a pulp by the Joker and strapped to a bomb in a warehouse and at the end of the issue they listed two hotline numbers. One to call in if you wanted him to live, the other to call if you wanted to see him dead. Fans wholeheartedly wanted to waste the brat.
So Jason Todd is dead, Uncle Ben is dead, and Bucky is dead.

Really dead.

Permanent dead.


Raid kills bugs dead.


Dead.


Cut to 2006, when the current folks at Marvel comics, they of the ‘Spiderman makes a deal with Satan to save the life of 126 year old Aunt May’ storyline (oh and I only wish I were joking), brought back Bucky. Not to be outdone in the stupidity department, the boys over at DC brought back Jason Todd the same year.
So now I guess it’s just ‘Uncle Ben dead’.


Sorry for that long departure/rant. Back to Zemo.

The original Baron Zemo was killed fighting Cap in Avengers #15 (1965).


(okay, so I guess it’s ‘Baron Zemo Dead’ too)


His son, Helmut (the original was Heinrich) comes around in the 70’s and takes up his father’s mantle and is now a well known villain and sometime leader of the popular villain-turned-hereoes team, the Thunderbolts. But enough about Helmut. Flames of War is a WWII game, so I couldn’t sneak him in there. Sorry Hel.

I love playing the villains, and just about all my wargaming armies are evil ones; undead, daemons, evil robots, forces of chaos, etc. What brought me to Flames of War was the idea of doing a very comic-y, popcorn cinema Nazi army, forgoing historical accuracy in order to discard the idea that any of these soldiers could be non-party members who didn’t want to be out there fighting any more than anyone else did, and also to not go into the unspeakable horrors we all know the Nazis committed.

Basically, to keep things ‘popcorn’ or Rated PG. Because in fiction, especially fairly light hearted fiction like comic books and popcorn movies, Nazis make for great villains. I think this is because you don’t have to spend a lot of time going into what makes the villain so evil. As soon as we learn the villain is a Nazi, we already know he’s evil, so we can move on with the plot without having to show the villain doing really nasty evil stuff that might darken the tone of the story. Also, knowing the villains are Nazis – and therefore evil – lets us watch the good guys mow them down throughout the movie without the film getting a gritty Sam Peckinpah feel. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade, Kelly’s Heroes, the Rocketeer, and Dirty Dozen are good examples of the Nazis used this way in films, and even in Star Wars, the Nazi similarities of Darth Vader’s bad guys – along with the fact that they blow up a planet full of innocent people a third of the way into the first film – allows you not to care when the stormtroopers are getting gunned down and blown up en masse by the heroes throughout the series.

So for my conversion project – and I promise I’m actually going to start talking about building the model soon – I decided to use Baron Zemo as part of a diorama that would function in the game as an objective marker. The objective marker is what the other player is trying to capture. In a typical game of Flames of War, there are several of them in play. They are often represented by a model of a destroyed tank, or crashed plane. My idea was to model an iconic scene from the Captain America mythos and use it as one of my objective markers.

In the flashback story where Bucky is killed and Captain America ends up in suspended animation, the duo are sent to stop the nefarious Baron Zemo from stealing a super top-secret British drone plane. They are captured by the madman and his powerful android robots that grow from the size of toys into giants (now do you see why I wanted to do a comic book Nazi army? The modeling potential for all that wonky Nazi science is endless)
Zemo ties the unconscious heroes to the drone plane (after dressing them in basic soldier uniforms) and prepares to launch it, giving his Villain Monologue ™ as he does so. Cap manages to get himself and his partner free just as the plane is taking off, but Bucky attempts to hang on to the drone plane to stop it. Unfortunately, the drone plane had a self destruct mechanism (or a bomb planted by Zemo) and it explodes, killing Bucky (yeah, I said ‘killing’ - Eat it Quesada and Brubaker) and causing Captain America to plummet into the icy waters of the English Channel, where he freezes into a block of ice and causing his body to go into a state of suspended animation, thanks to the Super Soldier Serum in his body (see, the Titantic didn’t need more lifeboats, they just needed vials of Super Soldier Serum !)

Now with the idea in my mind, it was onto the conversion work. For the Baron himself, I started with a German soldier about to throw a stick bomb while holding a rifle by the barrel in his other hand. The rifle barrel made an excellent lever for him to pull on the drone plane’s control panel (made from bits of sprue and a small plate from a 40K Ork vehicle kit), while the grenade was easily cut off to leave just his clenched fist, which was repositioned into a dastardly fist-waving pose by carefully bending the metal. Most of his head I carved or shaved away with a hobby knife or file, and I did the same with his backpack. I then proceeded to sculpt Zemo’s garish costume with green stuff from Games-Workshop.
For the drone plane I used a cheap toy version of a modern jet plane. It was a slightly smaller scale than Flames of War models, which worked to my advantage to help disguise the actual jet. I also carved and shortened the wings and fins, and also added a toothpick spine to the nose of the plane, and a sewing pin antenna (wanted to make the remote control obvious, with that and the matching antenna on Zemo’s control panel)
Cap and Bucky were made from more German soldiers, carefully chopped, filed, and sawed, with green stuff hair instead of helmets. They were trussed to the plane with thin wire. For the base of the model, I used a square large monster base from Warhammer. The launching ramp for the plane was made from plastic model railroad bits. The base was coated in gray pumice, and after it dried, I added some wires to look like cables going across the ground leading to the drone plane’s control panel.
The painting went well with Zemo - I was happy with the how well the colors I mixed matched the page from the comic I was using as a reference. The plane was a little trickier. In the comic, the drone plane is actually British, and is commandeered by the Nazi villain, but I thought the Zemo reference was already obscure enough (especially since Cap and Bucky aren’t in their usual costumes), so I decided to make it a Nazi drone plane in order to make it less confusing. With the swastika on the plane, everyone will understand that Zemo is a bad guy, and the people strapped to the plane are members of the allied forces. I realize I still suck at freehand drawing with a paintbrush when I tried doing swastikas on the wings (since you can’t see both sides of the tailfins at the same time, it isn’t as important that they match exactly) so painted over them and added Totenkopf decals that I’d been using for the rest of the army (I figured that symbol would be appropriate for a Nazi force that was led by the Red Skull).
And here is the finished product. I’m very happy with it, though I will probably at some point do some little touch ups and detail work on the plane and the two prisoners, and add some details like lichen scrub bushes to the ground on the base.

Ghosts N' Goblins revisited

Better late than never, as they say.

Over six months after the date of the tournament they were needed by, the Ghosts N' Goblins have finally hit the tabletop. The main units I had needed to finish were the trolls and the Goblyn Queen on her chariot, and then a bunch of pumpkins to mix in with the night goblin bases.

I spent some time in the past couple weeks working on it all, and then finally got to bring them out for a game against my friend and frequent tabletop nemesis, Bob.

Since Warhammer Fantasy Battles 8th edition had arrived and change a lot of how the game was played since I originally conceived of the army, I had to add a little more to it to get it from the 2250 pts which was the standard game of 7th ed, to 2500 pts which seems to be the new standard for 8th. Fortunately I was able to do this by only adding a single miniature and now Gauntfield the Scarecrow (who was fortunately painted up for the last Shellendrak game I hosted) joined the cast as an Ork Warboss.

Tonight Bob brought his new Warriors of Chaos list and we slugged it out. Things were looking fairly good for me going into turn 3, but after that my winds of fortune changed starting with the Goblyn Queen blowing her own head up casting a spell. It ended up a solid win for Bob, but we both felt the list performed well and both had a good time with the battle.

Most fun for me was the plethora of goblin fanatics (my ghost) which were on the field at once around the halfway point of the game. Since the idea of all of the fanatics were my core concept for the army, I was very pleased with this, and my scratch built ghosts looked great all over the battlefield!