W is for Warhammer Monthly

Warhammer Monthly was an anthology comic published by the Black Library, from March 1998 to December 2004, running to 86 issues in total. The final two issues were published bi-monthly as the Warhammer Comic, and it remains the only comic book ever to win an Eagle Award and get canceled in the same week. It featured stories set within Games Workshop's fictional universes of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.

The first ever comic strip I had commissioned was a Necromunda tale called Kill Confirmed (1999). It was the story of a Spyre Hunter's hunt and was illustrated by Paul Jeacock. My second comic strip was also set in the Necromunda underhive. This one, Slavebreak! (2002), was one of P J Holden's early pieces of paid comic strip work, for which he created a number of character studies.

In December 2002 Warhammer Monthly became Warhammer Warped Visions, just for that month. It featured one-shot variations of Black Library's most popular comics, but with their settings reversed between the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes. For example, the Dark Elf Malus Darkblade was portrayed as a Dark Eldar, while the Titan Imperius Dictatio was shown as an Empire Steam Tank. I contributed the lead story which turned Battle Sister Ephrael Stern, of the hugely successful Daemonifuge strip, into Ephrael von Stern: Sister of Sigmar, transplanting the character to the damned Warhammer city of Mordheim. The strip also featured on the cover and the editor told me that if he'd had the budget for some colour pages that month (as he had the year before) it would have been my strip that received the colouring treatment.

My other strips were all Tales from the Ten-Tailed Cat and were collected, along with the ones I'd written that appeared in Inferno! magazine, in The Complete Tales from the Ten-Tailed Cat (2005).

My total contribution to Warhammer Monthly is as follows:

Kill Confirmed – Warhammer 40,000 science fiction comic strip – Warhammer Monthly free issue given away with White Dwarf Magazine #232 (1999)

Slavebreak! – Warhammer 40,000 science fiction comic strip – Warhammer Monthly #57 (2002)

Ephrael von Stern: Sister of Sigmar – Warhammer fantasy comic strip – Warhammer Monthly #63 (2002)

The Tale of the Hound – Warhammer fantasy comic strip – Warhammer Monthly #79 (2004) – re-printed in the graphic novel The Complete Tales from the Ten-Tailed Cat (2005)

The Farmer’s Tale – Warhammer fantasy comic strip – Warhammer Monthly #80 (2004) – re-printed in the graphic novel The Complete Tales from the Ten-Tailed Cat (2005)