I remember once, during the strip's original run, a friend told me that his favorite character was "the dwarf". I was at a loss to figure out what he was talking about, since of course there are no dwarves in Soup, either. It finally transpired that he was referring to Snormar. Now, I suppose Snormar does have the big bushy beard associated with the stereotypical fantasy dwarf, and he carries an axe, which is the stereotypical fantasy dwarvish weapon... but I hadn't had dwarves in mind at all when I created him. If anything, I thought of him as coming from a Viking-esque culture. (But then, I think at least some of the stereotypical fantasy dwarven ideal may also be patterned after the Vikings, so perhaps I can't say his resemblance to a dwarf is a complete coincidence.) He certainly does not, however, have one of the principal defining characteristics of the stereotypical fantasy dwarf—namely, their shortness. Snormar's actually quite tall, significantly taller than the champion. Or at least he's supposed to be, though to be fair my artwork didn't always (or possibly ever) get that across, and he may very well have looked considerably shorter than he was meant to in some (or possibly all) strips he's appeared in.

Anyway, Snormar's not a dwarf, is what I'm getting at.

The reason I bring this up now, however, has to do with the fact that, well, the world of Soup also contains no orcs. However... I can't really argue much against the observation that the korg(s/i/en) are pretty similar to the typical fantasy depiction of the orc. (Which, incidentally, isn't really all that close to Tolkien's version, even though the orc is one monster that definitely did come originally from Tolkien.) If one were to insist they were just orcs with the serial numbers filed off... I'm not sure how good a defense I could mount against that accusation. Perhaps, one might say, I should have just called them "orcs" and been done with it, rather than giving them another name just to be different. (Though of course in that case this particular strip wouldn't have worked.)

I guess the thing is that, for this particular storyline (well, not just this particular storyline; the korg(s/i/en) have actually been mentioned before, though I'll leave it to especially intrepid readers to figure out where), I wanted something that, well, fit the same ecological niche, so to speak, as the orc in a more "generic" fantasy world. (More or less; the korg(s/i/en) are far less ubiquitous than are orcs in such fantasy worlds, so, while you may eventually be seeing more of them, they won't be popping up very often.) So, since I didn't want to just use orcs, I created a new monster to fill it. But yeah... I still would have a hard time denying that that "new monster" is still pretty orc-like. Ah, well.