Robert Evans

As Sledge notes in his article, after 1987, the people making Warhammer 40,000, I think in part because 40K really started to take off and they were like, oh, this could actually be big.

We probably shouldn't like make so many jokes about partisan politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game.

Yeah, probably should have Maggie's face on as many banners.

So they got a little more subtle with things.

The politics didn't disappear entirely.

And you could always tell it was like punks making it in that period of time.

The early years of 40K art and lore contained many references and allusions to aspects of punk culture.

So today in the game, Space Marines are these gigantic, much taller than people, like monk-like, like heroic warrior monks, right?

And they're, you know, they're all superhuman.

They're the result of all of this genetic tinkering.

And, you know, they're incapable of fear.

And they're these kind of like idealized, like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical like warrior, right?

Like that's every

thing a space marine is that's not what they were at first the first space marines were basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this brutal imperial that were there to like crack down on dissent and stuff there's a great from an early uh white dwarf magazine uh there's a piece of art that i'm showing joe now that's like an early it's a drawing up there's like a punk

Who's been spray painting Marines out on a wall and he's got his hands against the wall and there's two space Marines standing behind him.

You know, they're not taller than him because they weren't initially superhuman.

They were just guys in armor.

One of them's got what looks like a stun baton in his hands.

And then there's text underneath it that says,

So they're space cops, right?