Herd Instinct
Script: Keiron Gillen • Art: David Millgate • Letters: Fiona Stephenson
A unit of Imperial Rough Riders are cut off by bestial orks. But the xenos scum are about to get a lesson in what real brute force entails.

And they really do.

For those who don't know, Warhammer Monthly is Games Workshop's periodical anthology action comic. Each features four strips, featuring either single strips or one of their ongoing characters. They're all based in either of their main universes, the original Fantasy world or Warhammer 40k. Of the pair, 40k is the one which more interests me as a base for stories. It's probably the most maximalist sci-fi universe in existence, an impossibly baroque and gloriously dark power/paranoid fantasia. It also features the largest guns the world has ever seen, which is difficult for a destructive phallocrat like yours deny the lure of.

How did I end up doing this? Jim Rossignol gave me a heads up they were always looking for scripts and, using my teenage years in the service of Imperium as fuel, hammered out a couple of scripts and sent them off on the off-chance. After a handful of revisions, Editor Christian Dunn bought HERD INSTINCT. Why do I want to do it? While part of my head wants to write sexy big-brain literature, I've got a big, dirty pulp tumour in the centre of my brain that wants to blow things up and hurt things in entertaining ways. Teenage-orientated action fiction is a noble channel for this.

And - as I said - the guns are very large.

For those interested in ordering a copy, I point you in the direction of the purchasing options. When it's out in a few weeks, you could pick one by wandering into one of the Games Workshop shops across the country. If you're a regular comics buyer, Warhammer Monthly is also distributed by Diamond so your shop would be able to get hold of a copy for you. Games Workshop also run a full online ordering service.

I'd recommend getting a copy for literally the most impressively and brilliantly ludicrous onomatopoeic words I've ever seen courtesy of Mr Millgates talented pen. You really can't go wrong with "THUNDER!!!!!!" written in ten-story high letters, can you?