Chronicle. who?

Been cleaning a batch of old Chronicle miniatures inbetween doing other stuff the last couple of days. Just uploaded most of the first lot HERE 

Now some of you will no doubt be scratching your heads as to the company I’m on about. The rest, of a certain age, will just be nodding sagely and thinking, are yes I remember them.

Well Chronicle was a miniature producing company of the early 80’s owned and run by Nick Lund, he of later Fantasy Warriors fame. At the time when Citadel were emerging as a miniature producing power, Chronicle was also starting to get a bit of momentum. Nick sculpted everything himself and at quite a rate too. So much so that it worried Citadel enough to buy him out and run his Chronicle lines along with his own. Nick went to work for GW as a sculptor, but it was a short lived arrangement. I can imagine having been his own boss for a while, suddenly having to take orders was an uncomfortable experience. Sadly the Chronicle name disappeared for good in 1985, while Nick went to work with Grenadier UK and produced some of his best ever work.

So what is so special about Chronicle? Well they are best described as unique. In the early days Nick wasn’t the best sculptor, not helped by the then limitations of the putties. His figures weren’t neat and refined like today’s offerings, more rustic and homemade in appearance.

The above is an Ogre with Club, and shows pretty well what I mean. However there are some miniatures that this style works well on, Orcs and Hobgoblins, and it’s with these that Nick excelled.

Hobgoblin warrior with a Shaman in the second picture.

A couple of Chronicle Black Orc Warriors.

Chronicle orcs and Hobgoblins are rough, vicious and feral looking. Clad in bits and pieces and armed with an assortment of crude and battered weaponary they are lightyears away from the grinning fools that GW went on to produce. I’ve painted some for my own collection, and they aren’t the easiest. I’ve never seen one pro-painted, and that’s a shame. Yes there are a lot of things wrong with them, but they have an awful lot going for them too.