John Blanche Is Dead

 John Blanche is dead.

Probably no artist in the gaming hobby was as simultaneously influential and original at the same time as he was. As artist and art director at Games Workshop, he was the key figure in creating and perpetuating the Warhammer Look that still sells gobs of miniatures to this day, and basically invented modern grimdark.

That kinda sells it short because he was also a huge part of what kept Warhammer weird--he had a creaky, eccentrically filligreed sensibility and a wonderful color sense that combined an electric modern intensity with a feeling for the weight of the past in a way nobody has ever managed to copy--war-banner red and the gold-yellow of bad teeth and age.

John Blanche pictures look like ancient records from an alternate universe where it all played out in a series of enigmatic and brutal cartoons. Like history paintings by a post doom-metal Terry Gilliam, everything is alarmingly vivid and yet completely inevitable. Prog rock in Hell.

His sense of anatomy and composition resisted the emphasis on optically plausible movement and scale that was so enthusiastically embraced not only in the fine art in the 400 years after the Renaissance, but by so many fantasy illustrators influenced by photography, comic books and guys like Frank Frazetta. Blanche figures don't move through space--they have always been there. He and a few like-minded neo-primitive geniuses like Ian Miller turned Warhammer and 40k's "backstory" and "fluff" into lore.

He could summon all the connotations of that word using an alchemy that made everything new old again. Anybody can make a picture and say it's something that happened a thousand years ago--with Blanche you felt it, even when they had space armor and bolt guns.

RPG artists can all depict war, these Blanche visuals were key to Warhammer's very cynical, British, and wargame-friendly sense of eternal war. Think Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, Garth Ennis, once more into the breach (and Bolt Thrower, of course). There's no fucking timeline in Warhammer, no progress, no revolution, no good guys, no solutions, no change in the setting, no leader you can trust, no reasons for any of it--you and another unworthy god met in school and now you will be moving miniature men back and forth on a hilltop you made forever.

His art and that of the colleagues he hired on and managed is the main reason that the British D&D crew at White Dwarf that turned into Games Workshop stood apart from all the other D&D competitors long enough to create a distinct identity.

And as far as I can tell, he was also really cool.

Rest quietly in the void, big guy. You've done enough.