Looney Tunes – Rabbit

Let’s hit the music!

Now that I’ve set the mood, I have one tiny miniature to show off this week. And in spite of my joke title, it really is a wascally wabbit! And a tiny one at that. The first couple photos I took really didn’t turn out nicely as a result. They’re overly dark and undersell the paint job, I’m sorry to say, but I will share them nonetheless.

Fortunately, I also took a miniature comparing the size of the bunny to the recently painted Nazi from Hellboy. What in the world is that rotten Nazi planning in this picture!?

That gives a better idea of how it looks and I will admit, I’m quite pleased with how the fur came out. I channeled the great impressionists of old to try and create some fur-like texture and I think it worked really well. The rabbit’s soulful eyes and smiling face don’t hurt either. I’m sure some of you are curious what this rabbit is for, but I’m not going to spoil it yet! Hopefully it will make an appearance again soon, if all goes well.

When I wasn’t working on this rabbit, I was wrapping up Lokaris which is basically done short of smoothing out the base with a few coats of black paint and then adding tufts. While I certainly could show it now, I think it will be best to wait until I get it completely finished, especially since it is so close now. I’m excited for that and I’m looking forward to working on some other stuff, particularly gaming minis and terrain which I have been neglected for a while now.

While I got this a little while ago, since this week is a bit slower, I figured it is a good time to talk about the Monsterpocalypse diorama. I got the base finally and took a photo of the potential layout with a couple of new buildings and Cthulu monsters I’ve added to the collection. Here’s a look at it smack dab in the middle of my hobby desk with lots of clutter in the background.

I think I like the size of the base overall. The main subjects aren’t too close together which is important. I probably didn’t leave enough room for streets in this layout either truthfully but I think there is definitely room to add a couple more buildings to the layout and it definitely needs some more apes as well. I don’t like the industrial building with the smoke stack on the left very much so that will probably come out and another skyscraper will replace it. All in all, it is really cool to see the diorama like this for the first time and to start thinking about the layout and all of that. I will try some other layouts at some point in the near future, to see if I like a different style for the diorama. Perhaps we’ll even have a vote on which one everyone likes best.

Monsterpocalypse has also been on my mind as of late because someone has put a decent amount of cool Monsterpocalypse minis for a fair price on eBay and it got me thinking, are there are pieces I might like to work on in the future that are worth picking up now? The answer is an easy yes. I have a display project that takes inspiration from Planet of the Apes already in the bank. I might do an Aztec inspired project as I already have a building for that and I really like the look of the Aztec bad guys faction in Monsterpocalypse. The one below is probably my favorite overall.

And then there is this guy who is an Earth elemental, essentially. He’s made for display painting with so many metallic and crystal surfaces to work on!

There are a couple of other ideas I have on top of these, but needless to say, I’ll be busy with Monsterpocalypse for a long time to come. Every so often, I think I’d love to play an Epic scale game as I enjoy working on Monsterpocalypse so much but then I realize that I can make so many cool display pieces using Monsterpocalypse that I really don’t need a game, I can just keep working on all these projects as time permits and that is a pretty good place to be.

And lastly, I wanted to circle back and talk about how getting into Judge Dredd is going. It has been a rockier road than I expected, truthfully. I’ll start with these in reverse order and talk about the Judge Dredd Megazine I bought. The Megazine has a lot in common with 2000 AD, in terms of formatting. It costs a whopping $15 and while some of it is in-color and the page count is fairly high, it felt pricey to me. I knew what the price was going in but I want to acknowledge that I felt like the Megazine needed to provide some value for me to want to buy future issues. In this issue, there were five different stories, all short and most of them were not self-contained. They were started in a previous issue or they were starting here and continuing on in future issues. I have to say that this really not new reader friendly and personally, I don’t want to consume stories in this way. Part of this is because you get a very small snippet of a particular story in a Megazine issue. If you want to read one story from beginning to end, you have to gather up all of the issues together and find them in each issue as you go as well. This is a LOT of extra work and really makes me want to only read collected editions where that work has already been done for you. To make matters worse, if I understood correctly, at least one of these stories is actually continued in 2000 AD so that means you have to buy even more stuff to get the full story and not just the $15 Megazine each month. While I’m not a huge superhero comics reader in the past couple of years, it is MUCH easier to get into a Marvel or DC title than 2000 AD because you really just need to find the issue where a new story starts and run with it. Yes, you won’t know a ton of stuff like all the characters you read about but if the story is good, you’ll want to learn more about it and keep reading to accomplish that goal.

As you can probably already tell, I didn’t get that desire from the Megazine. There were five stories and surprisingly, only one has Judge Dredd in it. The first is about Judge Rico which was Part 4 of that storyline so I only sort of understood it, the second story is about judges besides Dredd including one that can talk to ghosts. The third (pictured above) actually has Dredd, which was nice to see. And then the last two featured Rogue Trooper and Lawless. Of the stories, I liked the Judge Dredd one best as it was set on a spaceship cemetery where people can visit digital tombstones of their loved ones. I thought this was sad but interesting. The second story about judges talking to ghosts to potentially solve a murder was pretty decent as well. The remaining stories I had little to no idea what was going on in them and the characters were completely new to me, which didn’t help. So all in all, it was not a good purchase and I won’t buy more of 2000 AD content in this format.

Prior to the Megazine, I also bought a Judge Dredd collected edition called A Better World. Because this was a collection of stories involving Judge Dredd and Judge Maitland, I found this much easier to follow and was overall enjoyable. I bought this one on a whim because I liked the premise and there weren’t many comic books coming out that week. Judge Maitland has a revolutionary idea. What if instead of spending so much money on law enforcement, Mega-City spent more money on social services and education to make the citizens less likely to commit crimes? Living in a country that has for-profit prisons makes this question very prescient and I had high hopes for the story. It also reminds me of this quote from Young Adult author, John Green, which I have always loved, probably because I used to teach myself.

So yes, I’m on Judge Maitland’s side here. Of course, I knew that things would not go well for her because this is Judge Dredd and Megacity! And indeed, the overall story is meant to be a tragedy. This is a minor spoiler so if you care about such things, do not read the rest of this paragraph. Unfortunately, the ending is almost literally what happens in Y: The Last Man but the story wasn’t nearly as good. It never felt like Judge Maitland was going to have a chance to be successful and the author never showed Mega City actually improving so her death and the demise of her ideas weren’t the tragedy that they were intended to be. I commend the authors for tackling a difficult subject and I think they tried to avoid being overly preachy which was wise as well, but I do think the ideas weren’t explored in enough depth to be satisfying ultimately. Unlike the Megazine, I did enjoy A Better World and it was a good way to read some Judge Dredd without needing to know a lot about 2000 AD. Unfortunately, it was $25 which is expensive for how many pages it has. That is definitely a running theme here. Judge Dredd/2000 AD is not cheap to read in the US and I don’t think that tariffs have anything to do with it (for once). I’m still interested and determined to read more Judge Dredd as I have the time and money but my biggest takeaway is that I won’t be buying any of it at my local comic book store to save some money. Its much cheaper and easy to get digitally so that will be how I handle it going forward.

To close out, I would like to tease that I’m reading something about wrasslin’, of all things, which I can already tell is going to be a great read that I will want to discuss next time. So expect to see powerbombs, suplexes, and sweaty men and women next update!