Comic Review: Orcs #3

ORCS! #3

Boom! Studios

Written and Illustrated by Christine Larsen

Orcs, the brain-love child of Christine Larsen returns with another adventurous romp in subversive fantasyland. While you’ll discover lots of staple fantasy elements in Orcs #3, don’t count on what you know of the genre to set your expectations.

The story of this issue functions in much the same way as previous chapters in the story. It takes a lot, and I mean, a lot, of inspiration from tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons in the sense of seemingly random encounters and splitting the party, resource management, and terrible plans from the low intelligence party member that makes up for the low IQ with being loud. This is all straight from. . . any TTRPG ever played. But this is where the familiar ends.

We’re don’t typically root for orcs. The Lord of The Rings created a premise for orcs to be rather irredeemable for decades. While this is still much the case (even “good” orcs in video games and books are something of anti-heroes), Orcs shows us that these misunderstood creatures are more a product of their environment than inherently evil or wrong or bad. They just live in a harsh world in which trolls with unicorn horns and furry tails are larger and stronger. Can you fault orcs for what they do to survive? Of course, some of the orc heroes make decisions that are surprisingly (not surprisingly) ill-informed. While most creatures wouldn’t pick a fight with orcs, trolls may be an exception, and if not for the resourcefulness of youth and the fury of parents when their children are in danger, the characters in this comic might have fallen into the same orcish cliche of dumb, compassionless, fighters.

The art is really where this comic shines. While the adventure is, if not standard, then at least tangential in pacing, it is the art that subverts many of the preconceptions readers will have about the fantasy genre. The trolls I mentioned earlier–the art and strangeness of their character design would have been a highlight in itself, yet Larsen delves into the magical realms of the fantasy genre with flowing and bubbly images after the party, in their extreme hunger, eat some totally normal mushrooms.

When it comes to the utility of images and text, the panel sequencing is seamless and while the fight scenes are jumbled, they are (thankfully) not crowded with hokey dialogue. Speaking of which, if there is one element that gave me pause while reading, it was some of the letters. Each letter has space between it that, at times, is close to the spaces between words. I paused multiple times while reading to parse the letters and blank space. However, as this plot is not complex I didn’t miss out on anything important.