The Grunts

JOE: Before I get to the many, many drawings of the main orc officers, here's thesupporting cast of grunts that make up the Wolverines.

STAN: I had a lot of fun coming up with the names. What you call your characters is a very important element in fiction. The ideal name should relate in some fundamental way to the character's personality. It's also important that there's a uniformity in the names, that they give the impression of coming from the same shared culture. It seemed appropriate to give the orcs kind of jagged names, so to speak, and often they worked well when they were short and brutish sounding. Many different fantasy races make appearances in the Orcs series, and I tried to give each a set of names that met the above principles. So the goblins' names are sort of spiky (and invariably hyphenated), the elves' softish, the humans' slightly eccentric, etc.