After the fantasy Elves, Mantic has released the second race in their range: the skeletons. We have taken an in depth look at their plastic infantry regiment of 20 soldiers.

 

First impressions:  out of the box the frames look excellent, with lots and lots of skely goodness and you can spot immediately some undead related classic gags like the imbedded axe in the skull, the crow eating the brain out of another skull and, my favorite, a properly mangy skeleton dog! What really took my eye was the sheer evilness emanating from the expressions of the heads available, this gives them a real character and eerie evil feel, I love it!

The Technical side: The frame is very clean and the detail looks extremely sharp. There is very little flash and the one that is there is easily removable with a knife. There is no mismatch at all and the mould lines are very shallow and engineered to be in unobtrusive places on the model. There are only some of the heads and the spear shafts that need a little bit more work with a knife or a fine file, however nothing that hindered the final look of the models.

 

What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG): The 2 frames you get in the box allow you to make 20 skeletons. 5 poses are repeated once and 2 of these have hand weapons already molded on and the other 3 can take either a hand weapon or a spear. The rest are highly customizable and allow you to make a champion a musician and a banner bearer, and equip the rest with either hand weapons or spears. All the troopers have shields molded on the bodies.

The build: cleaning the models was very straight forward and they let themselves to be built really quite easily. All in all, cleaning every single piece and taking my time to stick them together, took me only 30 minutes! And believe me, for me, that is VERY fast. This is thanks to the relatively limited number of parts needed to make the bulk of the regiment whilst still allowing you to put in bucketfuls of character on the rest of the models. This is particularly appealing to me as I do like a regiment to look dynamic with the most variety possible within it, and at the same time not spend too much time gluing single arms and legs independently for each skely.

The soldiers expectedly took to the primer very well. And the whole regiment together looks great!

I decided to start off the painting by fully painting 1 single troop skeleton, to give me an idea of how long the whole project will take and to check that my chosen colour scheme worked.

I am not sure why, but when I think of undead, the colours that spring to mind are green and black, so that is what I have gone for.

Painting the model was a highly pleasurable experience and it was finished in no time. I had some Army Painter dip left over from my last project, so I decided to try and use it in a slightly different way. Instead of dipping the model (I wanted to take more time on it) I instead used the dip as a wash, applying it generously to the model with a paint brush, after I had applied the basic flat colours to the entire model (photo on the right). After it dried out, I sprayed it matt and finished the final highlights. The final result is to my complete satisfaction. However, as the model was already quite good before any highlights, I will probably use only the trusted dip technique (more on this technique in the comming months) for the rest of the troopers and only highlight the command group.

The verdict: These are fantastic skeletons, they are draped in character and are extremely detailed. There is even a piece that allows you to represent a skeleton bursting out of the earth; a real MUST in any skeleton regiment.  The only drawback of the frame is that if you want the entire regiment to have spears, you need to perform some converting. Having said this, the conversions required are extremely simple, only requiring a snip of the hand weapons at the shafts and of a spear, and then gluing the two parts of the spear either side of the hand weapon shaft. And if you consider the price that Mantic are charging for them, then they become an absolute MUST buy.

I can’t wait for the next installment from Mantic and on the frame there is an ominous dead and very bearded head that possibly preannounces the next release. And it looks like it will not be a very “tall” release…

The finished result.

For more information and to buy these skeletons, just go to the official Mantic Website:  http://www.manticgames.com/Shop-Home/Undead.html