A Farewell to John Blanche...

Hello and welcome (back) to The Gazetteer, Wyrd Science's once supposedly weekly and now apparently biannual newsletter. First up a big welcome to the surprisingly large number of you who have signed up to receive our newsletters while we've been on hiatus (mainly it has to be said through our defunct Substack account which we've copied over here, if for some reason you only like to receive newsletters via Substack then there should be an unsubscribe button within easy reach). And for everyone else hello again, I hope that last few months have been good to you.

So, we're back... Kind of. I'm still trying to find a way to send this thing out that doesn't cost a bomb and a format for it that doesn't take too much of my life away but over the next few weeks I'm going to try and get back into putting these things out on a more regular basis whilst trying out a few new ideas.

This week though I have been spurred to put fingertips to keyboard by a few different things, not least the sad news that John Blanche, probably one of greatest, and almost certainly the most influential, British fantasy artist of the past 50 years passed away on Monday.

For so many of us John’s art was the gateway to a whole new life, one far beyond the mundane reality of the suburbs and towns we grew up in. He was a genuine inspiration, a man who's ideas shaped the spiky contours of countless imaginations when so many of us we were exposed to his work at, let's be honest, probably far too young an age.

One of the key early Games Workshop artists, John's relationship with the company went right back to issue 4 of White Dwarf, which featured his work on the cover. Over the following years, alongside the likes of Russ Nicholson and Ian Miller, John played a pivotal role in defining a peculiarly British fantasy aesthetic, one that owed as much to the likes of Motörhead and punk as it did Frank Frazetta.

His paintings and illustrations for the Fighting Fantasy/Sorcery books and the work he did to define the look of the Warhammer universes both as an artist and equally importantly as art director at Games Workshop, provided a powerful and much needed, grubby counterweight to the more epic, and indeed heroic, look that dominated American fantasy art in the 1980s.

It’s almost obvious to the point of triteness that British gaming would be unrecognisable today without his input and singular vision, but I’m forever grateful that he gave us these fantastic worlds that for all their outlandish wonders and horrors, felt intrinsically connected to the culture that I and so many other British kids grew up in at a time when, as I've spoken about before, we were being flooded with and seduced by so much chrome plated Americana.

Still, for all that his work was rooted in the country of his birth his impact went far beyond our shores, influencing & inspiring people everywhere dice are thrown to determine the fate of weird, often horrible little creatures. With Warhammer a truly global phenomenon, and one that looks set to only get bigger and bigger over the coming years, it's fair to say that no child today is entirely safe from the seismic effect his creations can have on fertile young minds.

Just yesterday morning before the news broke I was writing about some of his Tolkien paintings from the 1970s. I’ve spoken before about the impact David Day’s A Tolkien Bestiary had on me as a kid, and so much of that was to do with the art of Ian Miller and John Blanche. John’s depiction of the Dark Tower of Mordor or the Battle of Five Armies are seared on my brain, and looking at them again now I still find them as evocative as when I first saw them some 40 odd years ago.

'We Are Legion' by John Blanche, as featured on the cover of the Skeleton Horde box

A year or two after that initiation when I started my first Warhammer army, the choice was obvious. John’s painting of an indefatigable army of bleached bones scouring the land on the cover of the Skeleton Horde boxset was too irresistible for my ten year old self, undead it would be. And would be again some 30 years later when half-cut I wandered into a Warhammer store for the first time in decades and surprised myself leaving once again with a box of plastic skeletons in my hands (a decision that directly lead me to starting Wyrd Science).

Today I can still pull any number of books off my shelves featuring his art & lose myself for hours in his art and the worlds that he did so much to create. Worlds full of darkness & horror but also, and for me more importantly, full of so much life and humour, worlds filled with an anarchic spirit that cut through what in so many other hands could have, and indeed often has, resulted in drearily macho power fantasies that celebrate rather than illuminate the grim darkness and absurdities that his work depicted.

I can’t say that I’d ever want to live in the worlds he created but my god, to this day, I do love to visit them.

Our condolences go out to all his friends and family and wherever you are now John, thank you for everything.

Right, always hard to know how to follow that kind of thing without it being too jarring or crass, but in more positive news I was invited on to The Grognard Files the other week to explain why on earth I'd start a print mag in this day and age. If my explanations for why I'd do such a thing don't clear that up then I'm pretty sure that my manner of presenting them will.

Like I said when I guested on the Smart Party earlier in the year, I'm fairly sure I have a face for podcasts and a voice for magazines, but apart from one comment right near the end which I regretted the second it came out my mouth I hope I was moderately entertaining and perhaps even illuminating. Despite my natural inclination to hide in a closet at the thought of doing these things I am massively grateful to Dirk for inviting me on, so do check it out if you have any interest in that kind of thing (or indeed any other episodes, they're all great).

The good folks over at Pics & Ink also flung a few questions at me that thankfully I was able to answer by email this time, and well I'd like to think it's worth a read, it's short anyway so you'll only lose two minutes reading it, so here I am in my natural environment cowering behind a computer screen trying to sound clever...

Finally, since it's been out for over a month now I was going to do a debrief here of the new issue but as this is getting quite long now and there's still plenty to cover I shall save that for the next newsletter. That does mean that if you haven't bought a copy yet you have time before that to get one and perhaps nod along in agreement or shake your head in disgust, choose your own adventure as they say.

For now though I will say a huge thank you to everyone who has bought a copy of issue 8, the feedback has, on the whole, been fantastic. I think the magazine's found a new rhythm and is going from strength to strength, so do please check it out. It's obvious really but the more we sell, the more people we can pay half decent money to to write for it, illustrate it and one day hopefully copy edit it and, all in all, the better it will be.

Right, on that note I'm going to go make a cup of tea and leave you with a whole load of interesting stuff that other people have written, we've enjoyed reading and that we think you may too. Try not to unsubscribe and hopefully we'll be back in your inboxes in less than 6 months time.

Thanks

John x

All the gaming stuff that's kept us staring into the black mirror this week...

The big thing over the past week was the UK Game's Expo in Birmingham, by all accounts it was the biggest yet and it seems like everyone had a pretty good time. Maybe we'll be there next year, that would be nice. In the meantime there's been some interesting posts by people who did attend looking at both the experience of attending and of running a stall.

Kieron Gillen appeared to have bought have half the convention's stock of games home with him (plus one Dr. Em Friedman, who's own account of the weekend is here). Looking forward to hearing about some of these in more detail over the coming months.

Colin from By Odin's Beard provided another useful and candid account of tabling at a convention as a small independent RPG publisher.

As did George from Three Sails, who it sounds like had a very successful weekend. Incidentally this reminded me that I really need to find time to run Gallow's Corner, an unfortunate side effect of the magazine's rejuvenation and new schedule is that I don't actually appear to have time to play too many games, which clearly sucks.

Anyway I'm struggling to think of both a more niche and yet somehow irresistible conceit for a game than imagine the 14th century peasant's revolt IF and this is a direct quote from the book "Thomas Hobbes had lived three centuries before he did, and if his book Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil had been published in 1351, rather than 1651." I mean, come on, that right there's speaking my love language.

Author Tim Clare, whose wonderful book The Game Changers we reviewed in Issue 7, wrote a great piece about attending the con with both his young daughter and his own AuADHD issues. It's a moving, frustrating, hopeful and ultimately somewhat hopeful piece and reminded me again of why I loved The Game Changers so much. Do go buy it if you haven't already, you'll read it in a day or two and you'll look at those unplayed boxes of games on your shelf with fresh eyes again.

And finally Kayla from Rat Wave Games House used her experience of the con as a peg to write something much more interesting and personal than a rundown of what the hottest Funko Pop was this year. Well worth a read.

https://ratwavegh.wordpress.com/2026/06/03/decision-to-live-ukge-2026-reflections-except-not-really/

Art, music, books, films, tv, weird shit, just all the other stuff we like...

It feels somewhat redundant to big up a new Boards of Canada album, if you're even vaguely aware of the band you've probably been counting down the days to its release for a while now. But it's here and well, for now let's just say that Inferno is very Boards of Canada and so far has chalked up about 15 start to finish listens since release, with Age of Capricorn earning several instant pull ups.

Client Challenge

RPG publisher and artist Jon Hodgson wrote a lovely piece about acts of creativity.

Probably my favourite discovery of the past few months has been Iain Mew's Super Chart Island, where he's basically working his way through every number one on the UK gaming charts of the 80s. As someone who (mis)spent a lot of my youth either huddled around my Amstrad CPC464 or my neighbour's Spectrum this is a wonderful trip down memory lane featuring so many games, such as Feud, that I'd completely memory holed. Seriously just dip in and out at random, wonderful stuff.

I had the immense pleasure of going out for a drink with Anne Billson last week along with the very excellent Johnny Mains (who we spoke to in issue 8 of the magazine) and then as an extra bonus the next day got to read her 20 best corridors in film piece in The Guardian. Now you too can do at least one of those things.

There's a very good looking weekend of skateboarding events coming up at both the BFI and Southbank Centre later this month, not sure if that prompted this but the Guardian also posted a great piece the other day of 80s & 90s UK skateboarding pics that has, embarrassingly, had me thinking about going out and snapping my ankles in a ridiculous for my age manner again.

Oh, go on, might as well play it again...

Oh go on as a bonus you can have another video, this time for Felt's Primitive Painters a song and video that for me effortlessly (well, in the studio it wasn't so effortless) conjures up a very particular time in UK music and over the past couple of weeks I keep finding myself coming back to...

Well, you made it this far, you obviously like something that we do. Why not buy a magazine and enjoy tens of thousands more words, many in the right order, from us...