Portrait of the Artist as a Young Orc
I was playing around with a self-portrait like this.
Orcs are probably my favourite fantasy creatures. Since I’m not a gamer as such, but more of an academic scholar, I see things in them that many hardcore gamers or fans of particular fantasy authors do not see. For example, myself…
Tolkien’s Orcs were the minions of Evil, and it’s easy to fall in the opposite trap and “redeem” them as misunderstood noble savages. I would like to avoid that, but who knows?
Orcs fascinate me for pretty much the same reasons as all stereotypical images of “the Other” or “the Enemy”. We are all somebody’s Other. As a child of emigrants and multiple immigrant myself, I have grown up with a sense of doubt towards those images every time they are presented as fact as well as fiction. Here is an inspirational cartoon from the 1910’s, depicting the two major linguistic groups of Finland from the point of view of the smaller one. As you can see, the threatening majority (the Finnish-speaker) is dressed like a peasant and looks more “Eastern” (cheekbones, slanted eyes, brushy hair – note also the full lips and broad nose, visual cues for “un-European”), pretty Orcish in spite of his blond hair (the ears!), while the small and desperately waving Finland-Swede has parted his hair neatly and wears a civilized western jacket.
I used to be a huge Tolkien geek as a teen, but I felt bad for his orcs because they were so screwed. They weren’t even damned through their own actions like the Big Bads, they were just created out of evil and then there was nothing any single orc could ever do to make himself better. Even the ground they walked on hated them; the best they could hope for was literally death. But they were written as sentient people. And Tolkien gave them all the cool language sounds. Bah.
Then again, I always tended to feel sympathetic towards the villains, reading fantasy. I now tend to assume it was because the main characters that were supposed to be reader stand-ins weren’t actually possible to identify with, for me, but they threw all the “odd” traits in the freak & villain corner, up to and including even the looks I prefer. Only my lack of skillz spared the world from terrible “villains redeemed”-fiction when I reached 20 or so.
My, your really old comics look a lot better than my really old comics :P
Regarding the cartoon; the Finnish-speaker looks way cooler and laid-back than the little Finland-Swede who doesn´t seem to be comfy on his side of the bench….point achieved
for the cartoonist, I guess! Is it the Swedish (?) heraldic lion/lioness in the background?
I went to read the Orc comic. Now I want to know how the story ends… I assume you’re never going to finish it?
B.T.: The lion in the background is from the coat-of-arms of Finland. It was already used in the 1580’s, but it is indeed of Swedish origin, to be more precise, of the House of Folkung (like the lion of Götaland!). The unique Finnish elements are the straight “Western” sword and the armoured paw, as well as the crooked “Eastern” sabre that the lion tramples. http://www.intermin.fi/intermin/home.nsf/pages/F329E47E4C4DEB58C2256B670063A282?opendocument
Lieber Hans, es freut mich sehr, dass du “Erlkönig” gefunden hast. Vielen Dank für dein Besuch!
I would really like to continue my Orc comic, but unfortunately I don’t have much time to draw at the moment. It breaks off too soon – there’s hardly any sign of the Erl King yet… It’s not abandoned for ever, but I can’t promise anything – sadly. If and when, however, I really hope you will find it.
Danke für die Antwort! I hope you continue Goldenbird – I’m following it already about a year and I quite like it. It was the reason why I found the Erlkönig comic.
Thanks for the info! I didn´t notice the sabre until you pointed out that one; kinda gives the whole coat-of-arms a balanced and interesting composition in my opinion, but the ideal would of course be if Mochi would be depicted on that old coat-of-arms – it could use some “pimping
up”.
B.T.: That’s a risky project. According to the website of the Ministry of the Interior, Using an emblem substantially deviating from this design as Finnish national arms or, as the law puts it, “selling any emblem violating legal provisions as the arms of Finland” is punishable by a fine. It happened to artist Harro Koskinen in 1974: http://www.kiasma.fi/site/pop/pop.php?tid=112&kortti=3&mo=