New Plague Marine Design – Praise Nurgle!
The upcoming Plague Marines look fantastic – but GW has walked this putrid path before.
The recently unveiled Plague Marines are amazing, but they are merely the next shambling step in a long line of Nurgle miniature design:
First let’s look at the new fellows:
We see a lot of the modern GW design library for Nurgle here. Note not only the obvious tattered armor, but things like: the asymetrical horns, bells, Nurglings, chains & censers, medieval knight faceplate/grilles.
The fly symbols, oddly placed orifices, cables aplentym, hints of fleshy horror deep within broken recesses…(someone needs a dentist – BAD)
The triple skull motif, tentacles/maggots, emphasis on large two-handed scythes & executioner’s axes, Prussian Pickelhaubes, occasional cloven feet.
Into the Gardens of Nurgle
Now we can start to go back through the GW catalog and see where so much of these mini’s appearance came from.
The “current” Plague Marines are ancient, first appearing in the 3.5 Chaos Space Marine Codex from 2002. Nurgle does indeed endure… Here we see the twisted fleshy armor and damaged equipment motif, but not much else. GW has come a long way in 15 years.
The Putrid Blightkings first appeared in the End Times series before being repackaged for Ager of Sigmar. This where a lot of the modern visual library of Nurgle design came from.
Note the grossly distended bodies, the orificies all over the place, tentacle/tongues, bells, and the fly motif.
Here we see the antlers, skulls, Nurglings, and quite creatively Nurglings and bells within orifices (eww)! The new Death Guard are effectively these miniatures simply transposed from Fantasy knightly armor, to older Heresy-era power armor marks.
Gutrot Spume also combined many of these elements from the executioner’s axe to the tentacles, orifices, cloven feet (look close), and knightly helmet.
Ahh the Glottkin. If you want to see asymmetry on a model – here you go. Again, large tentacles, oversized antlers erupting all over the place, orifices, scythes, bells, triple skulls, knightly grille. Really the Brothers Glott have it all!
Going way back to the Chaos Possessed, you can see perhaps the earliest plastic “modern” incarnation of the funky “chest mouths” that show up all over modern Nurgle models.
They say that both Mortarion and a new plastic Great Unclean One is coming. I hope I can stomach what GW’s digital sculptors have in mind… *shudder*
~ Do you think GW did a good job bring the Plague Marines into the modern era of mini design?
