“More Scriblings from under the wargame’s table”

Long term readers will know that at about this time last year I posted up a few of the cartoons I drew back in the nineties for “Ragnarok” the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargamers rather infrequent journal, and “The Pale Squat” the monthly newsletter of my old local club, The Wirral Games Club. Well I thought I’d do it again this year (No I am not struggling to fill the blog posts, honest!), I’ve also added a couple of drawings I did but I’ll go into more detail on those when we get there. I’ll give a little background to go along with each one as we go and we’ll take them in chronological order, anyway enough with the chatter let’s get under way…

This one comes from 1995, and I think was featured in both “Ragnarok” and “The pale squat”, (I do like to get value for money from my cartoons if possible!). The premise is pretty obvious really, I think I pinched the idea from a cartoon I saw in a very old annual I saw at my grandparents’ house in Luton. My grandfather used to bring back all sorts of “junk” from lord alone knows where! I can vividly remember there being a set of tubular bells up in the spare room and the hand off of a shop window dummy sitting atop the piano in the scullery! There was also always a good collection of books and annuals about (including a large collection of “Giles” cartoon books). The original had a couple of pith helmet wearing missionaries and a witch doctor, so I just gave it a bit of a fantasy spin.

“Star Trek”, has always been a rich vein for Sci/fi based humour, any series that has run for as long as that has is bound to be full of catch phrases and visuals that are familiar to the general public, so I would be amazed if something along the lines of my effort here has not been done before, that said, it came to me without any conscious prompting from another source (so I’m taking full credit here). Mister Scott would be for ever threatening that the engines on the Enterprise were being pushed beyond their limits, though we all knew of course that they would never ever actually blow up. It was fun drawing the Enterprise though I remember, as I used to doodle various of my favourite spaceships in the margin of books all the time, the Buck Rogers “Hawkship” being a particularly prevalent one.

A more wargames based one here, and another for Ragnarok, it says 97’ in the corner but I thought I’d done it earlier than that as the panel is quite simple and empty and as I went on the pictures got more detailed and full, (it could be a one I suppose but then that makes it a lot older that I’d have thought, oh well doesn’t really matter!), The figures are of course “Not space marines”, and I’ve even got them on “Slotta” bases (spit , spit!!), though of course if they were really in a 40K game there would be a lot more dice on the table.

This last “funny”, is from 98’ and came about as I recall from me reading somewhere that a film company was looking into producing a documentary about “wargaming” (never happened as far as I’m aware), and were looking for people to take part in the program. However they were only interested in people who took the hobby to excess, e.g.. had twenty million figures, could recreate the battle of “Waterloo” with one figure represents one man in 25mm, was the world’s worst rules lawyer or liked to dress up as characters of the subject matter as they played the games! Hence the cartoon here. Why Darth Vader? I can’t say, I was probably fixated with Star Wars at the time, but then I still am!

OK so there you have a few more of the cartoons I did for Ragnarok, but the other thing I was always desperate to get was one of my pictures on the cover of the Journal too, now Barry Quin and Michael Scott used to basically have this tied up between them, but I tried (oh how I tried!) I think I must have sent in eight or ten different pictures in the hope of finally getting one on the cover of the “Rag”, But to no avail and eventually they technology caught up and they started using photo’s instead. So to finish off this little trip down memory lane I thought I share with you a couple of my favourite ones. The one on the right is a dungeon explorer, though exactly how that snake was supposed to fit in that vase I don’t know! And the one on the left is of a rather “pulp” inspired lady astronaut finding something rather nasty lurking in the darkness behind the airlock door (if you look you can see where the holes were punched on the left hand side so it could fit into the folder it was in), I don’t think heels that high would really be practical in space but hey it is fantasy after all!

Anyway please forgive this little self-indulgent wander through my folders of pictures and old copies of Ragnarok, sorry still no new painted figures next week, I have got something in mind though, as we build up to one of my highlights of the year to end December.

If you are interested you can see the cartoons I posted up last year by following the link below..

https://rantingsfromunderthewargamestable.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/scriblings-from-under-the-wargames-table/

To see some cartoons by someone who really knows what they’re doing check out Simon Moore’s “Moortoons” blog at…

http://mooretoons.blogspot.co.uk/

So till then, Cheers Roger.