Miniature of the week (mow) I

There has been quite some trash-talk against GW on the blogs and forums in the last couple of weeks. And to be honest, GW deserved it, no doubt. Imperial Guard and silly Grey Knights wrecking 40k, Chaos Demons wrecking WHFB, stupid White Dwarf releases, pathetic fineca$t quality and of course the inappropriate prize increases. This has all been discussed for some time in numerous posts. Let me get this straight, I  participated in some of these debates and fully support the current discontent against GW, I do. But what I will not do is to open this discussion up again, but instead I would like to start a new (hopefully continuing) series of posts that are devoted to the things that GW did good in the last years (of course with a lot of exceptions): nice miniatures.

I think everybody has its own favorite miniature from GW and there are a lot of very nice miniatures out there.
So what I will try to do is to regularly show the miniatures I like most and explain why.
Now this is nothing but subjective and some reasons why I like a certain miniature may even not be explained in the right words, but nevertheless I will try to share my thoughts with you...

Of course I am aware that there are a lot of companies producing nice miniatures (some even much nicer than GW) but I will restrict myself here to GW but not to 40k.


So my first miniature of the week (mow) is the beloved 'Emperor's Champion':

picture taken from http://wh40k.lexicanum.com

I am sure everybody knows this miniature and almost everybody has to admit that it is fantastic. The helmet with the laurel wreath and this heroic pose are outstanding. His armor, his fantastic sword and his movement - he is walking slowly - combines this to a great miniature. Which is by no means restricted to the Black Templar army and in fact you can find a lot of nice conversions on the internet, including some winged space marines. Personally I added a storm shield and slightly rearranged the sword arm.
I think this model truly is a classic.

What do you think?!