Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for December 12 2023.
PANEL ONE: The robbers still block the champion's way, the leader holding a sword to his face. KORG #1: You're not goinmg anywhere! We have you completely surrounded! PANEL TWO: Angle from behind the champion. CHAMPION: Um... no you don't. KORG #1: Well, all right, not in the literal sense, no. PANEL THREE: Close on the champion. CHAMPION: You don't have us surrounded in any sense! You're just all bunched up there in the middle of the road! PANEL FOUR: Angle from behind the robbers. We now see there's another korg behind the champion. KORG #1: When I say we have you surrounded, I mean that Morbop is standing on your mount's tail. MORBOP: Hello. CHAMPION: Well, that's not really surrounding us, is it? NEZHONI: Works for me, Bub.
December 12 2023

So I said a couple months back that I wanted to avoid making the setting of Soup "a typical fantasy world, with elves and dwarves and orcs and dragons." In light of this, you may wonder why there are apparently orcs in this strip. The answer, of course, is that they aren't orcs. Sure, they may look like orcs—or at least, while depictions of orcs across various media and product lines have certainly not been consistent (I'm personally partial to the pig-nosed orcs of the first-edition D&D Monster Manual), they at least have features consistent with some depictions of orcs. (Okay, I don't recall offhand seeing any orcs with ears that big, but whatever.) And they seem to be serving a similar narrative function as orcs. But they're totally not orcs. They're a completely different, original type of creature that... just happens to resemble orcs and fill a role that orcs could have just as easily filled.

Or at least, that's more or less what I guess I tried to tell myself at the time. As I also said in that post where I said I wanted to avoid making the setting of Soup a typical fantasy world, "I don't think, though, that I really succeeded." And these not-orcs are one element supporting that. (Were I creating this strip afresh today, I'd probably just making the robbers human, or go to the other extreme and make them more exotic and not resembling typical fantasy orcs at all.)