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For my 777th JSVB post, I am pleased to present... "The Wrath Of Gandhi"!
The last few days, I've been posting my progress on this piece, but I neglected to mention the star of the show: General Mahatma "Wrath-O" Gandhi.
For the non-geeks among my JSVB readers, this is not at all the famous world leader Mahatma Gandhi revered for his peaceful spirituality and unfailing sense of justice. This is an infamous counter-culture Gandhi who spews death, destruction, and mechanized chaos in his bid to take over the world.
Gandhi appears as a playable character in the Civilization V videogame. There are dozens of world leaders available to play, either as avatars for human players or as computer-controlled opponents. Each computer opponent is given a numerical rating from 1 to 10 for several behavioral attributes. As a running joke for every version of the Civilization game, Gandhi's desire to acquire and use nuclear weapons is set to 12/10, or a 120% likelihood that he would choose to use nukes.
Since Gandhi in the game generally flourishes through peaceful diplomacy and careful population management, he's not an easy character to bring to full-out conventional war. If provoked, Gandhi would much rather carpetbomb the world with nukes than raise a massive army to crush the other nations into submission.
Some time ago, I wondered how a Civilization V game would go if Gandhi used a conventional military to take over the world. He would go marching on the world's great capitols in an Indian GDR, or Giant Death Robot, the most powerful conventional military unit in the game, as yet fictional in nature. I tried a few times to make Gandhi a tyrannical megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination, but typically my ambitions were aborted during the Renaissance, Gandhi being cruelly taken out by other more combative nations at least 400 years before the invention of useful robotics.
My online friend ragan651 had a lot more success with Gandhi than me. He took over most of the Civilization V world, but was stopped at the very gates of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The illustration is my what-if scenario, had he been able to break the French resitance and storm their capital in a GDR, and then rule the world unopposed. I've tried to replicate the smudgy, palette-knifey art style of the anonymous illustrator charged with coming up with painted pictures for the Civilization V game. It's not quite a fit for my own art style, but it's close enough to prove that the Civilization art catalogue can be expanded.
The Civilization V GDR is your typical hundred-foot-tall walking death-robot. My version of the GDR is much closer to the nulcear-age aesthetic of the old "Mars Attacks" collector's cards from Topps. (For another take on collector's cards here on JSVB, please click here.) I like the big glass dome because that makes it so much easier to see General Gandhi raging inside. I also like the big crushing pincer claws, while the missile rack is a nod to more Japanese-inspired killer robots. The Civilization V logo is courtesy Rdg Vitorino of Logopedia.
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