| A rather rushed snapsnot of my entire (bar the painted pieces) pre-slotta Citadel collection. But is the stuff WORTH collecting? |
Good evening (well, it is as I type) and welcome back to the Realm of Chaos 80s blog. Services have been erratic at best over the last two months for a variety of reasons. By and large, the pressures of my job (its been really tough) have left me with little or no time to Oldhammer.
Thankfully, the end is now very much in sight and my weekends are once again my own. The miniature desk has lain in dormancy and is little more than a dust-covered shell of its former self. But soon (Saturday morning I hope) paint will once again splash across the leaded brilliance of old school miniatures. And with just a month to go to BOYL 3 (or the Oldhammer Weekend 3 if you are that way inclined) I better pull my finger out if I am going to get the first stage of my McDeath project completed.
| My first ever pre-slotta model. A troglodyte if memory serves and a bugger to paint. It wasn't an experience that raised my appreciation of them in any way. |
In the short term, I want to discuss pre-slotta. This post has been remained rather embryonic for a while and was initially inspired by two things. The first was a fellow collector who is conversation stated that 'pre-slotta was all crap and not worth collecting' and the second was the few pre-slotta pieces that I bought as part of my McDeath project. If honesty is the best policy, I will point out here that in the not too distant past I would have heartily agreed with that collector. Even before the Oldhammer Era, I would pass over pre-slotta miniatures as a matter of fact when cruising eBay for classic figures. They were cheap, they were cheerful and they were naff...
Of course, I was aware that there were passionate collectors out there. But my heart told me they were fools and that the Realm of Chaos era stuff was the best Citadel ever put out.
But time mellows the fire, and I have found my opinions have changed. Pre-slotta is not something to be dismissed as an irrelevance and chucked out once torn from the brown paper package. There are undiscovered gems among their ranks, as the following miniature illustrates perfectly.
| The perfect paint-job? I think so. |
My interest in pre-slotta took a u-turn once I had this model in my collection. To begin with, I wasn't much impressed. The lump of lead I held in my hand was just as indistinct as the image to be found of the model on the McDeath handout from 1986, its features a hazy mash of nearly thirty years of grime. But within an hour of its immersion within the miraculous Dettol, a revelation was brought forth on the end of a bent fork. For with a little light brushwork, and a squirt of Fairy Liquid, the incredible character of the model was brought back into the light. After all, no really clear image of the model was available online for me to ponder before, so the sight of so much detail was a real boon.
I like to think it was that joy of discovery that inspired my hand to produce such a great paint-job and I have said before that Brooben is some of my finest work to date.
So what are your feelings about the range? Of course, I appreciate that there will be fans of these models out there. Nostalgia will always play a big part in scenes such as ours, and those half-forgotten emotions of yesteryear return quickly as we handle models we knew in our youth. My friend Stuart is one such collector, and being slightly older to me, really appreciates our solid based friends as being of 'his era.'
But are there any other fans of the pre-slotta out there? Or does the slotta based miniature hold dominance over the Oldhammer Community? Are these solid based figures really as crap as some believe?
Of course, it is largely all a matter of opinion, isn't it?. A 'good miniature' is going to vary from wargamer to wargamer. One man's Nagash is another man's Striking Scorpion after all. But do pre-slotta miniatures deserve their reputation for being squat, poorly made and lacking in detail ?
Before you answer this question, I will leave you with a couple of images in regards to pre-slotta models. Perhaps they will help you consider?
