Orc Stain vol. 1 - James Stokoe (w/a)
Image Comics, $17.99, ISBN: 978-1-60706-295-0
The thing about Orc Stain… It’s full of dicks — purple-and-green-headed monsters… cocks, dongs, peckers, peters, pans, rods, meat poles, tallywhackers, ding-a-lings, ding dongs, dorks, dicktators, love pumps… heat seeking moisture missiles… one-eyed wonder worms… wangs, willies, wieners, units, noodles, knobs, schlongs, tube steaks, red rockets, meat puppets, John Thomases, johnsons, trouser snakes, Mr. Happies, Lincoln logs, Alabama black snakes… boners, choads, hard-ons, helmets, main veins, man muscles, meat popsicles, one-eyed monsters, skin flutes, pocket rockets, pricks, shafts, steamin’ semen roadways, third legs, tonsil ticklers… melted-marshmallow squirt guns… Power Swords (or the keys to Castle Grayskull)… wankers, weewees, Mr. Winkies, beaver cleavers, meat thermometers, sausages, bologna ponies, bone coasters…
Now, comprehensive and rude as the above list à la George Carlin may be: compared to the number of orc gronches* savagely diced and mutilated within the first six issues of Orc Stain, it’s about as darling as a small child farting while blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. Severed gronches line the belts and necklaces of orc warriors, wrap around warlords’ necks like furs and hang from shamanic staves as if they were mystic wards.
These are not, however, the only dicks in Orc Stain. The Orc Tzar, leader of the Jungle Clan and Ganga-Gronch** obsessive, is a huge dick; Boss Beard and his deadly Shaktu shock troops are hairy and four-armed dicks respectively, and lastly, Pointy Face, who perhaps deserves all that comes to him, is a very nasty dick.
Orc penises.
To emasculate a fellow orc is a sign of violent potency and supremacy which, in a race that, at this current point in the story, is completely devoid of females, makes for a cultural identity that is entirely neurotic. But the gronch is at once sacred and powerful and a commodity, for if an orc who’s claimed another’s gronch wishes he can skin, slice, dip and fire a gronch to turn it into chits: the orcish currency. It can only follow, then, that the greater the number of severed gronches that exist in the orc world, the greater the amount of wealth.
Were it not for one unequivocally important piece of the story structure, all this dickery might amount to nothing more than a very pretty comic drawn by a dude obsessed with orcs and penises. Thankfully, though, there is a balance between Orc Stain’s male and female actors, and it makes good sense that a culture that is basically one giant penis, a culture without flaws in the minds of its people, entirely healthy, be threatened by walking, talking STDs.
To date, the Swamp Rambas are still quite a mystery. We know they are adept apothecaries, Poison Throwers to the orcs, and that when an orc is infected with their poison they bloat and fester, growing intense sores and boils until they burst. And of course, most importantly, judging what we know now they are a race made up entirely of women. Up until the reader meets the first Ramba, Bowie Enocraz Yaramund, the women in the world of Orc Stain are used for sex only. These “love nymphs” are seen as second class objects made for fucking, and in no way do they hold any power over their orc lovers. Perhaps this is because they do not threaten the orc cocks. They promise comfort and escape from the constant dick-on-dick action of orc culture and smile all along.
The Rambas, though, not only find the orcs repulsive, but in the case that some unlucky warrior idiot wanders into their swamps, they waste no time turning them into piles of puss and slime. If to be an orc, a real orc, means keeping one’s manhood intact while depriving your peers of there own; to be a threat to an orc one must become a threat to their entire system of sexual dominance: a promise that in any one encounter, the most an orc can hope for is to walk away an abomination, their gronch too horrible to be worth a single chit.
-- Ian Burns
*Gronch is the orc work for genitalia. If that wasn’t already clear…
**Gronchiest of Gronches.
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