Smilepunk

This might have been the image that made me decide to jump headfirst in this gnomepunk blog:

This guy pulls together gnomishness, steampunk, and cool batwings, all in one groovy package. Enjoy!

I guess you can buy a Tic Toc Apocalypse - Bat Fighter Gnome on Amazon, but I first saw it on Multiple Personalities's awesome Flickr page.

Return of the goggles

Okay, let's bring this back into mainstream gnomepunk (wow, parsing minute distinctions already). Remember a week or so back when I told you that WoW had papercraft versions of their characters, including their totally kickass gnomes? Well, I wasn't lying:

Behold - the intersection of cutting-edge online fantasy roleplaying geekery and the nerdliness of paper modeling, a tradition that extends back to the start of the previous century. Thanks to the 3D modeling techniques used in designing video characters, it is actually a natural match from a technical standpoint. But who cares? It's just one more way to deliver the gnomepunk.

This papercraft gnome was found on ObviousWinner, some sort of pop culture site.

Change-up

Okay, let's switch things up. This guy brings the gnomepunk in a bit more light-hearted way:

His creator came at this from the robot angle, but in the midst of all the various little robots he made was this Robo Gnome. According to his press, he like to frolic in the rain.

That's right, he frolics. Until he unleashes those Spring-driven Stomping Boots of Doom!

Oops. Sorry.

This Robo Gnome and other robot creations of Lockwasher can be seen (and maybe purchased) at SoothBrush.

Spoooooky

What is it with all these gnomepunk artifacts? They tend to the scary, evil, creepy themes. Like this one:

Actually, these "Urban Gnome" variations on the traditional garden gnome come in a lot of different flavors. This one just looked the punkiest.

The Urban Gnome figures can be found (and purchased) at Vitaminliving.

Deeeeevil

I said that this week would feature some artifacts that you could actually get you hands on, and here's on that follows right up on the last feature. Not only does calling your villain a gnome make him more badass, but...

apparently if you want The Devil to be scarier, make him into a gnome! This figure was made by the wonderful folks at Playmobil for the Karstadt Restaurant chain. While Playmobil is a German company, the toys are sold internationally, and this figure's "International Name" is Devil Gnome. Because gnomepunk is far worse than mere endless diabolical evil.

This Devil Gnome can be found on Collectobil, a collector's and trader's website for Playmobil figures.

Eeeee-vil

When I was a kid, I read the Bantam Books paperback versions of the Doc Savage stories that originally appeared in pulp magazines in the nineteen-thirties. The heroic Doc, a paragon of human achievement, fought mad scientists, loathsome dictators, criminal masterminds, and nefarious schemers, all bent on taking over the world. But when the stories needed something really scary, you know where they went:

That's right - get lost, Lex Luthor! Take a hike, Joker! The baddest villain around is The Evil Gnome.

Okay, this sinister adversary was actually just a short guy who was into throat-slashing and remote decapitation, and not a real gnome. But that's the cachet of gnomepunk: it turns a little bad guy into major badass, with nothing but a name change.

This Doc Savage book was featured on the Groovy Age of Horror website.

Gnomes in the gnews

After that romp through female fantasy gnomepunk, let's take a bracing dip into the real world - such as it is. This week, we will be featuring gnomes either as they appear in the wider pop culture or in artifacts that you can actually own.

Let's kick it off with an Unsolved Mystery, as Robert Stack would call it:

Bigfoot with a gnome hat? Gnomefoot? According to 5 Magazine, this fellow was caught on film in the town of General Guemes, Argentina. After a bunch of fisherman heard noises and filmed this figure, they were "really afraid." As matter of fact, as word spread and more sightings were reported, the entire town was "covered in a pall of fear." Because, as we all know, gnomes are as scary as hell.

That's gnomepunk.

The 5 Magazine website reported this story.

Girls just want to have fun

We're going to close our Ladies' Week here at gnomepunk with an image that is one of my personal favorites:

So, this one is throwing a lot at us. We have our classic bewhiskered and be-goggled sciencepunk gnome riding a mechanical contraption that seems to be a cross between a velociraptor and an ostrich. But the crowning touch is not The Old Man, but the Girl Mechanic. We know she's a mechanic because of the wrench and pouch attached to her belt, and because of her gauntlets. She probably needed to make some last-minute adjustments to the Mechano-Ostriraptor, but grandpa jumped on board and fired it up before she could finish. She gamely grabbed on as he took off, and is now hanging there shouting imprecations and warnings for him to slow down while she holds on for dear life and wishes she hadn't taken her goggles off.

That's my kind of gnomepunk.

These gnomes are concept art from Jason Chan that was posted on CGHUB; he has lost more great stuff at Jason Chan Art.

Oh, you meant REALLY tough!

Let's just bust it wide open:


So, WoW comes through, not just with the goggle-based gnomepunk, but with the ass-kicking gnomepunk as well. This lady looks right on the edge of delivering a smackdown, if you ask me.

The Gnome Death Knight posted by the niffrig on the mmorpg discussion board.

Is it tough you want?

It has developed through our inquiry that there are at least two main varieties of gnomepunk: the one that has to do with goggles, and the one that has to do with ass-kicking. (And of course, there's that rare and joyous variety that combines both.) I'll let you get which flavor this one is:

Girl gnome? Check. Functional armor instead of a chainmail bikini? Check. Sword? Check. Nasty-looking battle-axe? Check. Result: gnomepunk.

Iris, Gnome Fighter is a Sandra Garrity Miniature presented by Mirrikat on Buzznet.

Now in 3-D

Okay, so here's another suitably gnomepunk WoW gnome, but this one has a twist:

Now, Belbi here wold be a fine addition to the gnomepunk gallery anwyay, what with her goggles and sleeve-warmers and boots and all, but she's even meta-geeky. This image is merely the design for a DIY papercraft model. Yes, that's right: there are folks who create patterns of WoW-inspired figures and then make three-dimesional versions of them in paper.

Welcome to the internets.

This papercraft can be found at the World of Warcraft Unofficial Papercrafts Website.

Scientess

Now this gnome really brings the pure gnomepunk, and her gender is merely an aside:

This gal brings the awesomesauce: scrolls, beakers, retorts, a big ol' candle, a giant book, and unicorn-toad! And she's so deep in thought (no doubt planning which law of nature to repeal next) that she's forgotten it's sitting there! Whatever you do in that lab, don't spill anything on yourself - or piss her off.

This gnome biogeneer is a homebrewed class for D&D Online that was posted on a community forum.

WoW, lady...

Of course, for gnome love, male or female, we can always go to World of Warcraft:

I don't know if those goggles are gnomefunk, gnome-bling, or merely haute couture, but we'll count them as gnomepunk tonight.

This unnamed gnome was posted on the RPG blog Aggro Management.

Let's hear it for the girls

I have noticed as we have moved through our gnomepunk collection that most of the badass images are of male gnomes. Well, I'm here to tell you that distaff gnomes are every bit as punky. Case in point:


Goggles. Gauntlets. This gal is ready to go. And she's just the head of the parade - welcome to ladies' week here at gnomepunk.

A Female Gnomish Engineer is DeviantArt by NuttyNuti.

Settle the score

The last of our gnome tough guys doesn't actually look to be doing so well here:

On the other hand, that gear he is wearing is definitely gnomepunk: a steam-powered exoskeleton with a spiked gauntlet. And the title of the books seems to indicate that the gnomes will eventually win the game (as usual).

I imagine the guy's older kin down in the corner invented the gear the younger gnome is wearing, but I am not sure what the chef's toque fling through the air is all about... maybe it was the dragon's?

There was another reason for my posting this particular image, besides just rounding out tough gnome week: it's predictive. I have decided this blog will run for exactly one hundred gnome-related image posts; this one makes sixty-six, so there's another five weeks of gnomepunk madness coming your way. At 100 posts, we'll have a valuable compendium of all the varieties of gnomish coolness. So stick around!

Gnomes - 100, Dragons - 0 is a splat book in the Dragonlance series from Catacombs Books.

Four sides of crunch

Here's a 360° view of pure gnomepunk toughness:

Once again, we're dispensing with subtlety here: just an over-muscled little tough guy with a big-ass hammer for pounding people into the ground like a tent peg. I realy dig his circus-strongman suit, with the wristband, weight belt, and obvious stitching.

Citadel C11 Gnome Hero is a miniature painted by BPI in 2010.

Not much for the subtle approach

Whispers are great, but sometimes you just want to step right up, shout it out, and throw down. Of course, if you're a gnome, it's totally kosher to summon a little help:

This guy - fully gnomepunk with his segmented leather overpants and straps and pouches - has summoned his eidolon: not the ancient Greek shade of the dead, but rather a customizable monster ally. What we have here seems to be a kitten-squirrel-badger-bear of some kind, and it's totally "cute but dangerous" as was the intention. And it's unintentionally gnomepunk, too.

Artist Michael Bielaczyc created Summoner and Eidolon for the cover of the Pathfinder RPG source book Advanced Feats: The Summoner's Circle.

Stealth mode

Another thing about the smallness of gnomes is that their size makes them very sneaky. They can hide in the shadows unnoticed and then come swooping in to deal fiery death. Like this guy:

This is another version of the Whisper Gnome, whom we've seen before. In the case, "whisper" seems to apply to faint whoosh of those magic blades cutting through the air, just before they cut through your body. Because that's all you're going to hear from this gnomepunk.

Whisper Gnome by Spyders on DeviantArt.

Stabby McStabberson

Gnomes are often overlooked because of their small stature. But people forget one of the sayings from the notebooks of Lazarus Long: "Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you." Here's a little man I wouldn't want having me in his sights:
Thus guy may be small, but it sure looks like he means business with that katana and that whatever-the-heck it is.

Cool boots and kneepads confirm the gnomepunk.

This gnome rogue by Sir Bedevere on DeviantArt.

The stuff of nightmares

I guess I have been further under the weather than I suspected - sorry to have missed some posts. But here's some fever dream gnomepunk to get us back on track:


Its creator describes this image as being of a "Male Half-Minotaur Rock Gnome [in] Full Plate [with] Scimitar and Heavy shield."

I just call it freakin' creepy.

Fubrik was presented by Thajocoth on the Giant in the Playground forum.

We're all out of bubblegum

Okay - after a week off for illness, gnomepunk is back! This week, we're going straight for the breadbasket, with some of the roughest, toughest, rockin-and-rollin'-est gnomes ever to kick tail on the internets.

Let's start it off right with this guy:

The best defense is a good offense - and if this guy's big-ass gnarly sword doesn't get you, his spiky shield will catch you on the flip-flop for a world of hurt. This is for-sure-no-foolin'-around gnomepunk, man.

This Gnome Warrior is some WoW fan art from Blizzard.