Decades of Golden Demon - A COMPENDIUM Volume One Review

 

The Miniatures Compendium

Golden Demon has long been a major institution of the Warhammer hobby, a miniature painting competition first held at the 1987 Games Day, Games Workshop's premier convention in ages past. It was eventually untethered from the trademark event, which disappeared in the warp around 2014. Golden Demon lived on, though COVID has given us a 2 year hiatus.

The Miniatures Compendium/David de Blas

It's hard to described the importance of Games Day, both personally and otherwise. It's especially hard perhaps because I've never been a particularly good painter. Golden Demon winning miniatures have been intimidating just as often as they've been inspiring. But I suppose that's part of the mystique.

Games Workshop injected plenty of pomp and ceremony into Golden Demon without making it too daunting for hobbyists: the titular leering demonic trophies became a symbol of a truly accomplished painter, with the best in show awarded the Slayer Sword, a steel replica weapon.

I certainly never imagined myself winning a Golden Demon, much less triumphantly holding the Slayer Sword aloft. Even so, trawling through the Golden Demon galleries as a neophyte hobbyist a decade ago is a memory I treasure dearly.

Legendary entries like Chris Borer's "Fratricide" and Ben Komet's "Last Survivor" shaped the way I viewed the settings they realized in astounding detail, as well as the hobby itself.

Golden Demon taught me that toy soldiers were a legitimate, bona fide art form, more than just the intellectual property of corporate entities or three color standard competitive net lists. 

Unfortunately, there's no central repository for images of Golden Demon winning entries, which are instead scattered across the internet. The official Golden Demon galleries of my youth are long gone. Fansites are even less stable: the most exhaustive (if also dated) repository, Demon Winner.fr recently went offline, much to the dismay of hobbyists worldwide. Games Workshop has its own Golden Demon wordpress site, though it only covers 2013 to 2019 and is very poorly put together for an official site.

That makes COMPENDIUM Volume One, an art book of Golden Demon winning miniatures compiled by Matt Avis, so desirable. It's not an official Games Workshop project, though it fills a niche previously covered by medium resolution JPEGs and White Dwarf Magazine spreads. For COMPENDIUM, Golden Demon winners over the decades were asked for permission to have their work featured in the book, with new photos taken of their entries or existing ones restored.

It's a work of love, a mighty 320 page hardcover tome covering decades of hobby history. With thousands of Golden Demons awarded over the years, it's hard to judge what entries should have made the cut. A matter further complicated by how many entries still exist or if their artists can even be reached. 

The Miniatures Compendium/Rubén Martinéz

Even so, Compendium does an excellent job providing high quality images of Golden Demon entries, ranging from some true classics to some more overlooked picks. It was good to see a proper showcase of Sascha Herm's "So it begins' The Assault on Helms Deep" and the very fantastic but strangely human diorama "The Egg" by Ruben Martinez.

Its hard to imagine a "proper" Golden Demon collection without Roman Lappat's "The Last Light," the Blood Angles vs Tyranids diorama, which gets the showcase it deserves.

Most entries receive a couple of pages, though the more complex an entry is, the more space allotted in order to allow for the best look possible. The dioramas in particular take up much of the book's space though with good reason. In a few cases, I was surprised (but not that surprised) to learn that some long time favorites of mine had details left out of previous galleries. A few entries include work in progress photos, an interesting part of the process sadly lost to time in most cases. 

Luckily, many entries include insights shared by the artists themselves. These blurbs range from a single sentence to four entire pages. It gives a look into the creative process behind making small, thumb sized miniatures feel larger than life. But for the most part , the array of space knights, sage wizards, and champions of Chaos are left to speak for themselves.

The formatting is a bit simplistic but is laser focused on the purpose of the book: the Demon winning entries themselves. It's more than adequate for the job, especially considering COMPENDIUM was largely put together by a single person. The selection is definitely dictated by which miniature painters could be contacted and were willing to contribute: the 80s and 90s sections are scarce and entries from the 2010s take up the vast majority of the book. 

The Miniatures Compendium/Robin McLeod

In some ways COMPENDIUM loses the opportunity to reflect how the standards for "pro-painting" have shifted over the years. But taking practical concerns into account, it's amazing this book came together at all, much less that it can cover as wide a variety as it does.

COMPENDIUM is more than worth picking up for a committed Warhammer fan. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if you can: late backing for the Kickstarter has ended and I haven't been able to find any information on further printings. Once again, I'm sure this is due to reasons outside of most involved parties' control but it's a shame that once again access to the history of Golden Demon remains fickle.

As some consolation, those behind COMPENDIUM also have an Instagram account with an even more exhaustive collection of Golden Demon entries. It's a major step up for preserving a vital part of hobby history and celebrating miniature painting as an art form, rather than a purely commercial venture.

Hopefully COMPENDIUM signals that some day the full breadth of Golden Demon history is easily accessible. Whatever the case, I'm certainly glad to have gotten a copy of this book.