Stryke Two

STAN:  I thoroughly approve of Joe giving so much attention to Stryke.  He's the lynchpin of my orcs war band, its guiding light and (usually, but not always) its still centre.  He's pretty bright, having worked his way up from a shit-shoveler in the dragon pens to captaining his own band.  He has the attributes of a leader, including courage and resourcefulness.  

JOE:  Not only were a majority of my orcs drawings of Stryke, but he probably had more variations than any other character.

Stryke One

JOE: First off, I apologize for the terrible pun, but Stryke will be the focus of the next three posts, he's Stan's main protagonists and dominates most of the drawing I did for this book. I'll have to go back a re-read my Orcs Omnibus, but I'm positive it has Stryke wielding a single handed sword and a dagger (of course for a normal human Stryke's sword would be a two-handed one). I gravitated toward this idea and there are hardly any drawings without a sword and dagger in his hands.

STAN: It's actually very hard to fight with a sword and dagger combination, given that the weapons are designed to do different things. Hell, it's hard enough just using a sword. Try it some time. In real life, sword fights would have been short, exhausting and brutal; the outcome depending more on endurance and ruthlessness than finesse. But although I try to stay somewhere on the side of reality, the spirit of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Robin Hood, Zorro and the Three Musketeers invariably creeps in. I make no apology for that. These are entertainments.

Other Orcs

JOE: In order to really bring Stan's concept of orcs with a culture to life, I wanted to experiment with other orc characters, never seen or mentioned in the graphic novel. Here are the results of some of those experiments.

Note: Jennesta's orc guards do make a brief appearance.

STAN: I like what Joe did here - I'm always happy to let creative people play with my toys. And it doesn't matter that most of these concepts didn't make it into the finished book. The important thing is the process of thinking your way through how best to approach and present the story. It's that iceberg again.

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.

Tip of The Iceberg

STAN: Again, a fascination on my part to see how an artist imagines the characters I created. Whether Joe's take conforms to my personal vision or not is irrelevant; in the context of the graphic novel his interpretation is just as valid as mine. It's a bit like seeing an animated version of a favorite comic strip and finding that the voices aren't the way you always heard them in your head. (I'm thinking of something like Peanuts.) But although it might be different, it's still legitimate.

JOE: Here's just a fraction of all the Orcs faces I drew during the course of this project. Those familiar with Stan's novels might be able to pick out some of the individual orc officers, Stryke, Collia, Haskeer and Alfray.

Better, Faster, Stronger

STAN: For those not familiar with my orcs, I should explain that, yes, they're ferocious, intimidating and unparalleled warriors, but they're not actually evil. Nor are they mindless brutes. The series' McGuffin, if you like, is that the orcs had a bad press. On the basis that it's winners who write history books, my idea was that the orcs were the race whose positive traits got airbrushed out of existence. I've always felt they got a bum deal, and one of my intentions was to provide them with a culture, beliefs, hopes, fears, a certain code of conduct and even a measure of nobility. Joe's portrayal brings out these aspects.

JOE: This is where I had a breakthrough. The proportions are far less exaggerated than the earlier drawings. This is a serious soldier that can move quickly and march long distances and still be ready for a fight.

Close But No Cigar

JOE: For most of my early drawings I was stuck on the notion of the orcs having large upper bodies and large hands with elongated arms and short legs, very ape-like. The also had large oversized ears and large meaty heads, overall their proportions were exaggerated. They looked monstrous enough, but didn't feel like the expert and capable soldiers that Stan had created.

STAN: Interesting to see Joe working his way towards an orcs body shape that's both eye-catching and practical. Again, the process of adapting and refining is something we do a lot of over here in the writers' corral. Not so much in terms of physical appearance, perhaps, as consistency in characterization and the dialogue attributed to a book's cast. Writing, like art, works on the iceberg principle- the viewer/reader doesn't get to see the 90% of the process that takes place out of sight.