Black Crow Miniatures – Grunthal III

I debated whether to update this week because its been less than a week since the last article and I don’t have a ton of progress, but alas, my desire to talk about things outside of the hobby is pushing me to update. In addition to painting the stones on his necklace, his eyebrows, and finishing his beard, I tried to revisit Grunthal’s eyes which was a pain and didn’t go super well. It was a bit stressful, in fact. I finally decided today that his eyes are what they are at this point and while far from perfect, I can live with them. The eyes really aren’t that big on this bust and so they were challenging. I am already looking forward to trying to do the eyes better on future busts.

We’re making pretty good progress on Mr. Grunthal at this point and it feels like we’re past the halfway point now so that’s nice to see.

As I teased last update, my Christmas present arrived this week and I’m pretty happy with it. I asked for money this year and bought myself a new computer monitor! I was using an old TV for all my gaming and computing and it was way past time to upgrade. My TV was 1080p (!) and this new monitor is not only curved, which is really cool and not just a gimmick, but also 2k capable and what a difference that makes. Even an old game that I play like Lord of the Rings Online looks so much better now. I’m also glad because I now have an updated computer, monitor, and mouse and keyboard. Roughly two years ago, I had a pretty sad setup that desperately needed to be upgraded and somehow, I’ve managed it. My room still needs a lot of work, including some wall art and new desks but Rome wasn’t built in a day!

I also managed to do some reading over holiday break, which focused on rereading Scalped by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera. In 2024, I declared that Scalped is my favorite comic book series of all time and truthfully, I hadn’t read it in ten plus years at that point. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had forgotten about a lot of moments in the story and I almost felt as if I was experiencing parts of Scalped for the first time.

One of the things that I find fascinating about Scalped is that it is almost like a noir location, instead of a story that is in the noir genre. In your typical noir story, an anti-hero, who is quite frequently a private investigator or criminal is the main focus. The plot revolves around them, and sure, there is usually a femme fatale, among other characters, but the focus is entirely on the anti-hero. In Scalped, nearly every character is affected by the setting, which is a Native American reservation and it brings about the downfall of quite a lot of characters along the way. I’ll talk more about a character who demonstrates what I’m talking about in a sec.

There are so many good characters that are fleshed out within the series too. Even the villains are have redeeming qualities and feel like real, living breathing people. I’m going to talk about and spoil what happens to one of the more minor characters because I found them especially poignant during this reread. There is a Sherriff named Wooster Karnow (what a name!) and who is in a neighboring town to the Prairie Rose reservation. In many ways, he starts off as your typical lawman figure in a Western. He is a big talker and is arrogant. He views the town as his and the reader quickly discovers that Wooster Karnow is corrupt. Later in the series, Wooster gets an issue that focuses entirely on him. One of the first things we find out is that he’s actually a liar and falsely tells people he was the equivalent of a Navy Seal in Vietnam.

My Dad is of the age where he could have served in Vietnam, if drafted, and he unsurprisingly knows people who served in Vietnam. One person he worked with served as a sniper and told my Dad about his experiences, some of which were relayed to me. Not only did my Dad’s friend have to kill civilians because the lines between innocent and enemy were really hard to tell, but he, as a grown adult in his probably 40’s or 50’s still had PTSD and flashbacks to his time in Vietnam. I had the opportunity to meet this guy and he was kind to me. I could also tell that he’d been through a lot and that it affected him to this day. Sadly, I think a lot of people who served in Vietnam were psychologically damaged by their experiences and its easy to wonder why someone would want to lie about serving in Vietnam. It was an absolutely horrible place to be a US soldier as we’ve all probably seen in Vietnam movies.

Despite all this, Wooster ends up meeting another lawmen who is chasing a dangerous fugitive. It turns out this lawmen actually did go to Vietnam and Wooster is immediately jealous. Wooster tries to apprehend the fugitive first and his life ends up being saved by the lawmen he is jealous of. Many people would quit being a Sherriff after this, but Wooster essentially doubles down and decides that he’s going to stop lying about being a hero and become one instead. That means shutting down the meth labs and criminal activity that he was probably being paid to ignore.

Wooster successfully busts one place on his own as if he were Rambo. He catches a kid who he hassled way back at the beginning of his plotline and takes pity on him and lets him go as well. A little later on, he goes for an even bigger drug den and when he’s abandoned by other officers, Wooster presses ahead. You admire his bravery and commitment to doing what’s right but fear for his safety. In the end, he’s shot and killed by the same kid he let off not too long ago. Its a very noir ending for a complicated character who I grew to really like, despite how immoral he was at the beginning.

Wooster’s story made me reflect not only my Dad’s co-worker but also my experiences as a young man in Cub Scouts. During that period of my life, I was introduced to a man who called himself White Eagle. He was presented as a Native American expert and a guest speaker. While he wore what looked to be Native American attire, this man was as Caucasian as one can be. He even had blonde hair, if you can believe it. His name seems somewhat ironic and amusing in hindsight but people believed him back then. White Eagle claimed to be Cherokee and even talked about the Trail of Tears as if it affected his people, as I recall. I “graduated” from Cub Scouts and didn’t move on to Boy Scouts because I hate camping and that was the end of that for me. It was also the last time I saw White Eagle. At some people when I was in middle or high school, my Dad was reading the newspaper and told me that White Eagle got arrested for fraud. It turns out that he lied about being a Vietnam Veteran and his Native American heritage. In the US, its illegal to pose as a veteran and you can be fined or do a bit of prison time for that sort of thing and that is indeed what happened to White Eagle, if I’m not mistaken. I tried to find any info about it but I think that happened almost pre-internet so no dice there.

It is interesting to compare this real life person to the character of Wooster Karnow, who initially saw himself as a sort of John Wayne character, despite being corrupt, and then when confronted with his fraudulent behavior, he tried to actually become the hero in a Western. This is the perfect embodiment of a character in a noir setting. In a noir story, imperfect people try to do the right thing and always end up paying a severe price for it. In this case, Wooster Karnow tried to right wrongs and be the good guy for once and was killed before he could see it through. To me, there is something very true to life about the character perhaps because of my experiences that I sprinkled throughout this.

Absolutely none of this has anything to do with miniature painting but it was so interesting and moving (for lack of a better way to put it), that I wanted to write about it in this post. Of course, if anything I said intrigues you at all, give Scalped a try. Its tense, brutal, and depressing, but there is a lot of humanity in it. Not really the humanity we idealize and hope to become, but instead, the kind of people that many of us actually are.