Making bones about Nagash

The 'leak' is here for the new official miniature for Nagash, the necromancer in the Warhammer setting. It looks like a sleek, comfortably variable plastic kit, nipped and tucked neatly using CAD.

The previous one gets a lot of stick and seems widely regarded, online at least, as one of the worst ever Citadel miniatures. There's mention in this thread of the idea the skull was badly sculpted on purpose. If true, not badly enough for me. I've always been quite fond of the model, and I'd argue the skull's the key feature.

So this is an alternative perspective, a reappraisal for posterity, or possibly Midhammer.

Let's start with the body that frames it, which may or may not be clownlike, but has a dense presence and menacing bulk, a tone of assured aggression and hidden depths among the folds and bones and calm mastery in the pose. The robes especially imply initiation and dark arts, classically fantastical turned up to 11; old school Warhammer fantasy, with less of the newer embellishment that seems to suggest an over- or faux- seriousness or uniform design cues, a need to tell, tell, tell, over every square millimetre.

Oddly, but naturally for what is a head, it's the skull that brings it to life, and suggests undeath more than just superficially. It's brutally massive and wickedly macabre, with the grimace going beyond even the restraint in the pose, into a keener and more deeply suggestive horror. A lesser model might be shouting or even screaming, releasing the tension; not truly horrific at all, and maybe more a parody of horror, or deliberately cathartic, blowing off steam before it can affect the viewer - who might after all be a child.

But this model has its teeth clenched, the jaw tightly closed and the eyes staring all the more intently for it: as if the scream won't come, or can't; is being bitten down on. That intensifies that sense of density, malevolence and dark depths, the deeper mystery of existence in this aspect of the Warhammer world. That is what Nagash is about after all.

So I say job done, but I realise it might take time and maybe need better pictures of the new mini for contrast. It remains to be seen if the new can improve on the effect, or even come close to it. But that's fine, especially if it really was accidental the first time round.

_