Pulp Eighth Army

 As promised, here is the first batch of British troops to back up the various characters on their Pulp missions. Its likely these will be sufficient for any eventuality, as my intention is to keep things on a small scale skirmish level, so like their Afrika Korps opponents, the majority of the contents of each box may remain on their sprues for a considerable time!

As its Saturday morning here and I dont have a hell of a lot to do, being in L4 Lock Down and having already taken the dog for a walk, I took an image of every single figure individually - so I hope its not too boring for you all!

I am pretty happy with how these have all turned out although the unforgiving eye of the close up photos has revealed some painting issues to rectify - of course, no one will ever notice on a gaming table, but I may as well tidy them up!

The whole group, less bren gun support

The inspiring leader!

RT operator - his collar needs a tidy up on the left!

Sergeant with SMG

Kneeling with SMG - a corporal perhaps?

Kneeling throwing a grenade

Working the bolt of the Lee Enfield rifle

Firing - the bayonets come separately and can be added - I only did a couple as cutting off the bayonet from the pre molded scabbard was a bit of a pain

A slightly odd pose - he (like the kneeling grenade thrower) was one of the last figures completed and I only had limited arms left to work with!

Advancing at low porte

Advancing at high porte with bayonet fixed - they dont like it up 'em, sir!

Firing

Advancing

Two shots of the firing Bren gun crew

As an extra bonus, I have taken one of the Crooked Dice female minion heads wearing a field cap and added it to one of the Afrika Korps figures to create another Afrikamaedel!

These heads are very finely detailed and the size matches up well with the Perry figures - they would be far too small on a Copplestone miniature, for example

Final image showing a comparison with some of her male colleagues.

Bis spater, kamaraden!

A couple of new figures

 I am 95% of the way through my first batch of Perry 8th Army Figures but they wont be ready to photograph for a day or two yet, so in the meantime, here are three figures I have completed recently. 

First up is a command base of female Bolsheviks, both being converted Copplestone figures with resin heads added. The officer has a head from Anvil Industries in the UK and the standard bearer has a winter head by Victoria Miniatures - who I think are based in Vic, Australia, but were shipped from some God forsaken place like Utah or Wyoming!

I have plenty more heads but want to wait for the Brigade Games Bolsheviks (ordered early July, shipped early August and have still not turned up here. 😒) to see which figures they suit best.....

The second figure was painted a few weeks ago - around the same time as the other two Hasslefree figures, but I only finished off her basing recently. Not sure what she will be used for, maybe one of the characters for the French, Spanish or Italian contingents in the Great Pulp Adventure Project!

Finally. on the subject of heads, conversions and the Pulp Project, I Googled 28mm Japanese Female Heads and found these, which I am likely to buy and use for both Chinese and Japanese characters!

The same company does European and African male and female heads of equal quality, if anyone has a need for such things.

Pulp Japanese

 Here are fourteen Japanese infantry from the recently acquired batch of Tsuba Russo Japanese War figures. In truth, they may be a bit too early but hey, its Pulp, so I can make up my own rules! (just like I will do when I paint the remainder up as a couple of different Chinese Warlord forces!).

These are really nice castings and were pretty simple to paint - I must say, I really do find painting khaki uniforms very therapeutic compared with most earlier era's!

Junior Officer

Senior Officer

Bugler

Ensign

Senior NCO

Rifleman

Rifleman

Junior NCO

Rifleman

Rifleman

Rifleman

Rifleman

Rifleman

Rifleman

Now, under the tenuous excuse that I had to do some research to come up with ideas for Japanese character figures, here are some gratuitous images I will be using as inspiration when the time comes - I feel some conversion (head swapping) may be resorted to.......!

These images are all from Chinese war movies - there seems to be an entire sub genre of Chinese films involving Chinese heroines defeating nasty bur beautiful Japanese officers - You Tube example attached!

A rare battle! Japanese female samurai challenges Chinese strongest female Kung Fu master - YouTube

Its all done in the best POSSIBLE taste of course, as Kenny Everett would have said!

Pulp Afrika Korps

 I have now assembled, painted and based all the Afrika Korps figures from one sprue of four (plus the separate command. RT operator base) that come in the Perry plastic box set. I think there are about twelve figures and that this is probably enough to add to a couple of characters to create a Nazi Tropical team (I may expand into other geographical areas, who knows where the spirit of the Papilon will lead me...!) Next up will be some of the recently recruited Oriental infantry (as I have 50 odd and only need ten or twelve per team, the Japanese infantry may be repurposed as various Asiatic teams...Warlord Chinese etc - as well as the nation they are intended to represent). 

First up, all the newly completed figures together

Well that was random - for the first time in months, Blogger took it upon herself to re order the images so that, in the words of the Bible, the last shall be first and the first shall be last....I have taken the first and put them back where they belong but as for the remainder, it doesn't really matter what order they are in.....

Anti tank rifleman - he may not play often, I am not sure how much use his weapon will be in a non vehicular skirmish game...

Kneeling infantryman in cork helmet with KAR 98

Advancing wearing short boots and bloused trousers

Advancing with MP36 and wearing laced up knee boots and riding style breeches

Two more advancing riflemen in the earliest tropical uniform

Firing MP36 wearing "Afrikamutze" field cap and bloused trousers

As previous but advancing with KAR 98

Firing MG34 crew both wearing the Afrikamutze uniform

For something slightly different, most will know that here in NZ, we are currently in a strict lockdown to hopefully contain and eliminate an outbreak of Covid Delta. I have had the pleasure of being roped in to helping "in the field" as we have had quite a number of our courier contractors off word in self isolation after visiting locations of interest - fortunately, it has been beautiful spring weather here most of the last fortnight so on each occasion I have "played courier" it has been quite a pleasant experience

A reminder of pre covid times - that last meal out with my wife a few weeks ago - a local eatery has created a Big Mac Pizza using wagyu beef mince and including all the usual ingredients, lettuce, tomato and the signature pink sauce - it really does taste like the original. The beer was good too!

My colleague holding one of the "essential" items we delivered last week!

A small portion of freight awaiting delivery in my home town of Pukekohe

One of our contractors with another load of essential freight

Ministry of Education packs for kids to do school work from home, sorted by street in one suburb. This is all for one contractor to deliver so I took one street worth (about 50 items) and spent an afternoon walking down this street (below) first delivery at no 3 the last was no 113 (the very last house in the street). 

Hope all is well wherever you are - we have obviously had a rather distressing incident occur here yesterday which I am sure is hitting the headlines wherever you read this. Hopefully all the injured make a full recovery and the nutbar who caused the mayhem has already been dealt with by the NZ police, so we wont have to worry about a costly trial or putting him in prison - pity they had not done the same with the Mosque shooter in Christchurch!

Unplanned Additions

I was browsing our local version of EBay, called Trade Me, for the first time in ages a week ago, when I noticed a seller had some Copplestone RCW figures up for sale - starting at NZ$40 for 55 Figures  - that's about £20 in sterling, I jumped on and put in a few bids but another buyer obviously had an auto bid on and the price had soon reached over $80, so I stopped - 5 packs of Copplestone brand new might cost around $100, but I don't really need this many more Bolsheviks anyway, so decided to quit. The same seller also had a listing for 53 Tsuba Russo Japanese War Japanese infantry figures - I put in a bid of $60 and nothing happened - I was leading the auction! I did nothing more till a few days later, an email turned up, informing me I had won the auction. So I am now the proud owner of these rather nice figures that I am sure I can find a use for in the inter war Pulp era - and at a current price of £8.50 ($17) per bag of 4, this purchase represents a pretty good bargain - 53 figures for the price of 16 by my calculation.

Here is a description of the contents of the pack:

"55 x 28mm Japanese Infantry for Sino, Russo-Japanese, Back of Beyond, WW1 etc. These are very nice Tusba Miniatures figures. There are:

43 Infantry and NCOs 2 Casualty figs 1 Medic running 1 Bugler 1 Standard bearer 5 Various officers

Plus 2 Machine guns with 2 crew each (they are missing the Tsuba pack figure with ammo box but you can add an officer to each for crew or the kneeling NCO)"

So another flutter of the butterflies wings! I have done a bit of work on some more of the Perry Afrika Korps over the last couple of evenings and should have them ready for show and tell in a couple of days.