Orc Stain Volume One

There is no other comic on the stands that is quite like Orc Stain. But maybe the world just needs Orc Stain. It’s about goblin culture and what it means to live in that kind of a society. It brings a little more depth to the guys than they ever get in, say, the Lord of the Rings or Magic The Gathering. So maybe they’re not really deep people, but the full extent of what we learned about orcs in the LOTR movies was that they are born from goop and spend a lot of time snarling while the camera pulls in close on their faces.

As presented in Orc Stain, there’s a single concept that drives the little buggers to do what they do, and it’s not a pretty one: gronch. What’s that? Er, well...I did say that it’s not pretty. It’s actually really repulsive. Humans have plenty of names for the gronch, but let’s just leave it as “a certain part of male genitalia.” It turns out that orcs are always trying to chop gronches off and make them into treasure. It’s not very surprising that these filthy creatures are centered around something so base. But can you really blame them? It’s just their nature.

So Orc Stain is thankfully telling a story that hasn’t been told before. That’s great! But there are more reasons to love this comic. This time there’s two words to remember: James Stokoe. One man does Orc Stain. The credits list him as writer, artist, colorist and letterer. That my friends is how a comic is made. I have no idea what kind of a schedule Orc Stain is on, but even if there’s only four issues a year it’s still pretty impressive that one man can do all of that. Stokoe’s art has a lot of linework to it, and he likes to draw detailed battle scenes. This kind of stuff takes time. Though I haven’t spent much time in the world of Eurocomics I want to say that Stokoe learned a lot from European artists like Moebius. I really admired the obviously painstaking effort that went into making Orc Stain a great thing to look at.

This volume collects the first five issues of the comic, and at this point we’re really just getting dipped into the storyline. There’s an appropriately named orc called One Eye who has some special powers and what appears to be a magic hammer. The big bad head honcho goblin wants to capture him. One Eye already escapes from some pretty tough situations in this collection...he gets trapped in a tube and launched out of a cannon, he survives a poisonous arrow to the torso, he is attacked while he’s trying to take a bath, and oh yeah, he also escapes intact from an attempted de-gronching by axe. Ouch.

This isn’t quite a work of literature, just fun. Orcs doing what they do best--fighting, wreaking havoc, hoarding treasure--what’s not to like? Orc Stain is an exceptionally well-crafter indie comic, and thank you Image for letting Stokoe do whatever he wants to within these pages!