John Blanche
I don't think popular culture looks the way it does without John Blanche, Games Workshop's legendary artist who died today. That is mostly for the better, a bit for the worse, but entirely important. I'd go so far as to say that he was the most important commercial artist of the past 50 years, more than Kinkade or Geddes, probably more (and this is a big claim) big film effects studios like Weta Workshop or video game companies like Blizzard.
This is not just about Warhammer. Blanche essentially invented what Warhammer looks like, but not everyone plays Warhammer. This is about everything else. Blanche painted in a grimdark style, using oils and mostly (but only mostly) limiting his palette to browns, blacks, and reds for punctuation. When you watch a movie now, you see his influence. Not directly. Direct influence from a Warhammer artist would be desperately uncool. But in the trickledown effect via the invention of the grimdark style which has filtered out everywhere, Blanche is there.
Orcs are green and speak with Cockney accents now. While that isn't entirely Blanche, because at its best Games Workshop is and was a workshop of crafters and artists, his orcs/orks are so good and so influential that they sit at the top of the pile.
When the orcs in The Lord of the Rings films shout in their thick Cockney accents, that's because John Blanche's art was so good it popularized Games Workshop's take on orcs as football hooligans. When you play World of Warcraft and see green orcs running around in a dungeon, that's John Blanche's influence. Prior to sitting down to write this, I found multiple threads on TTRPG forums asking when orcs became green; it's so de rigeur that people don't realize that it wasn't always like this.
There is no Emperor without John Blanche. Without the compelling figure of the undead, undying but dead Emperor, there is no Warhammer 40k. There are no bestselling Horus Heresy novels, no Trump as God-Emperor memes, no God-Emperor as reasonably common phrase in the lexicon. And how prescient is it to provide visual realization to the creeping sense that we are now ruled by the old, who will never leave, who will stay with us no matter what, sucking up humanity's psychic energy?
Undoubtedly, these sorts of motifs would have burbled up into the culture anyway, but it's the specificty which is notable. And it's notable, indeed. The Dark Knight, Stranger Things, World of Warcraft, Warhammer. Always Warhammer, which was invented by people just observing the world around them. From an interview with the man:
It’s a kind of social comment, if you want to intellectualise it. Games Workshop is dealing with two universes: there’s a fantasy universe, which is very dark and Tolkeinesque and there’s a science fiction universe that’s set 40,000 years into the future. Although the latter is science fiction, it’s more medieval fantasy in a futuristic setting. The inspiration for that is all around me, it’s everywhere, it’s in the architecture in Nottingham, mansion houses, gardens, tudor panelling. I very much live in the old.
Vale John Blanche.
