Orc Stain

Orcs, orcs, orcs. I write a lot about orcs - so much so that you might think I was obsessed. Well, I am I think. I just can't get over this strange, somewhat Utopian belief that if we (fantasy readers/writers/fans) as a community can just work this one out, can just rehabilitate our treatment of orcs, then maybe the world will be a better place. Sometimes I think it shouldn't matter, I shouldn't worry, and then I discover that people have been writing games where the Zulu people are all orcs and then acting surprised when people call them racist (protip: if you write a setting in which Europeans are presented as predominantly human and non-Europeans are presented as non-human, then no matter how bad-ass you make those non-humans you are still equating being European with being human-standard, i.e. normal, and being non-European as being abnormal, problematic and, well, not really human). That's when I realise that this particularly tedious and unhelpful, and metaphorically barren, fantasy trope of mapping fantasy races directly to real-world groups of people isn't going to go away.

But, I'm not here to talk about Victoriana and what might be right or wrong about it - I haven't read or played it and so I can't really say whether their handling is sound or leaves much to be desired (all I was really saying above is that they shouldn't have been surprised that people called them out on it). I'm here to talk about Orc Stain and why it is good and why you should read it.

One of the best things about Orc Stain, which isn't immediately apparent when you pick it up (there is talk of there being other fantasy races, all running scared of the orcs, but you never really meet them) is that the Orcs are basically the whole of the world. The story is set inside orc society, so immediately they get to be themselves, rather than some othered horde. And yes, it's true that life as an orc is nasty, brutish and often short, and all they like to do is fight, but that's ok; we see this from the point of view of an orc striving for meaning to his life, not as an outside observer judging the non-human scum.

Secondly, the orcs aren't an analogue of any one human culture. This is really important. They are also not a lazy, predefined sub-Tolkien/Games Workshop rip-off, so they don't just channel the failings of those particular tropes either. Instead, Stokoe has clearly taken bits of things that he likes, and bits of things that look good and mixed them all together with his own ideas to create an orc that is clearly still the fantasy race, but that also represents itself more than anything else (well, there is something else it represents, but I'll get onto that in a minute). So there's elements of Japanese gangster and samurai films, of Mitteleurope hero sagas, of Meso-America and Hollywood and 2000AD and it's all wrapped up in an absolutely beautiful visual style, a language all of the creator's own with the self assurance that comes from knowing that you get to control everything in the comic.

What all of this does is to allow the metaphorical power of the orcs to be used to explore something other than 'these violent foreigners aren't really people, you know - not like we are at least.' Orc Stain is, amongst other things, about gender. It is a very masculine study of what it is to be a man, or a certain kind of man at least, within a society that views being a man in a very narrow way. Orcs are all (as far as we can tell) male, and obsessed with genitalia. Women, for the most part and within orc society, are represented by passive Love Nymphs (yeah - it's not going to be passing the Bechdel test anytime soon). The only female character we meet who is actually a character (with agency!) is a sexy action chick and all the orcs are scared shitless of her, precisely because she has agency. Which... works, in the context. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it is a critical study of masculinity, rather than a simple piece of gung-ho chauvinism and for that I loved reading it. Plus it has some beautiful violence in it.