Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

Intelligent, proud, tavern manager and apparently a single mother.

Discuss.

Because she deserves her own topic.

I'm curious about her. I wonder if this'll be played straight or if there's a twist coming.

cant say im as interested with her as with her daughter. though im kinda wondering who the father was/is, and how she came to be liveing in a human town.

Well, she could be living in a human village because the orcs did not want her half orc (and possibly mute) child. Maybe she thought the humans would bully and demean them, but the orc tribe could even kill Jone outright.
If Jone was born out of love and not out of rape, maybe her own tribe sent her away and she thought there was a much better chance for her child among the humans.
By the way, she seems really young.

I don't know how to estimate a female Orc's age except to automatically deduct five years before I speak it out loud. <== Diplomacy.

But visually M. White Eye looks young to me. Well her anger and pride gives her an older look but when she is unguarded she looks young.

I find Madam very intriguing. Single mothers and their story interest me because I know several in regular life. So I want to know how she came to be in that tavern with her daughter. What happened to the father, the family/clan she grew up in? What choices she made as opposed to what choices were made on her?

She has to have a very good reason though. Orcs are not a race to act submissively so she is making a pretty tough sacrifice.

Not the males anyway. The women are supposed to be submissive, though I'm not sure how things are supposed to work when interacting with other species.

Though being submissive makes sense in this case, she hasn't been shown to have any real support so she's got to take what they give out or she's out of luck.

"Acceptance is deception is resistance." - Silence Leigh in Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott.

I must disagree, for Orc women in general and in the case of M. White Eye in specific female Orcs are not submissive. We see them on the Dark council along with the males. They have to sign up to be in Glon's harem. If they were submissive then Mrs B would have told Glon to order a dozen to begin with and see how many more he would need after that.

Please do not confuse self-control and restraint for being a submissive.

If she did not have those attributes in abundance we would have been seeing a comic of young hooligans being torn limb from limb and the Mayor's head on a pike.

I'm not confusing anything with anything. Typical orcish culture, not necessarily in this comic, puts female orcs into a submissive role. Because that's how their primary diety has decided things should be. While the series is not an exact model of that it's still somewhat based on that. How many female orcs have we seen in positions of power? One.

And after all Madame White Eye's submission is not a matter of being polite to the mayor, which could be self control and restraint, but a matter of accepting an unfair accusation and an insult with a bow.

I'm with Morgana; I'd read the Madame's response as the strongarmed acquiesce of someone who knows she's "their kind" to the townspeople, and thus, doesn't gain the benefit of any doubt whatsoever, but rather, inspires such doubts simply by existing. This is the resignation of someone who knows she's lost the game by default; now it's such a matter of waiting until said game starts play. Not submissive, really, so much as aware of the precarious nature of her position in this society.

I would like to also draw attention to something I've been rather enjoying in this new story arc -- that is, the ease with which our illustrious Beholder King captures the particular facial geometries and body languages of specific orcs, panel after panel, over time. That's something quite tricky to do even with human characters; take a look at the quintessential sequential humorist Phil Foglio's early strip "What's New (With Phil and Dixie)" for proof that even one's principal characters in a two-main-character strip tax one's eye for consistency, and then, take a look at the slowly-evolving model of Mrs. Bloodhand over the years, as she's been visited through the decades of her life. There is little mistaking Mrs. Bloodhand for Madame White Eye; their brows line differently, their snouts slope and rise differently even when making similar expressions, their teeth sit slightly differently in their muzzles. This would seem to be damning our host with faint praise, for this is something we tend to expect from our artists, yet when I think of how often artists fail to deliver this tightness of character model and resort to other means to differentiate characters (colors, modes of dress, hairstyles, etc.), spotting someone who can make a species with little real-world reference point graphically biodiverse is a particular treat.

This segues to a point more appropriately made in Jone's thread, though, so forgive me if I stop here, then repeat myself a little there.

Its really puzzling why the family White Eye are in that town. Many of the town folk are hostile to both of them. Sure they own the tavern but is the value of the tavern worth the harassment that is a daily event? This is with the expectation that somewhere else is going to be a better place to raise a child. The tavern might be entailed or otherwise unsellable. Maybe no one would pay what its worth.

Plus I agree, very good drawing with Madam.

Theory time! Maybe it was her human lovemuffin's, and the hostility only stepped up after he died. She's still got her very orcish surname, so they probably weren't married... If that's the case, then I'd guess that either she got it in the will or Jone technically owns the place as next-of-kin.

Well at least we now know that the tavern gets pretty good business. The place looked extremely crowded in the latest strip.


As for why they live in human lands, it could be that Madame white eye was kicked out of her native orc clan (outside the black mountain I’m assuming)) for either some past crime she (or possibly an orcish relative/spouse) had committed, or perhaps even because she gave birth to Jone. It could be that the entire family was exiled. And the rest either died off, haven’t been introduced yet, or simply moved on to different places.


Or it could simply be that they cant afford to pack up and leave, and/or are saving a portion of the bar prophets to do just that.

Of course all these are very logical explanations but i am wondering if there is something even deeper going on. Maybe a promise or even a curse... she is putting up with too much.

It could be that while she has a place among the orcs, Jone would be kicked out, but still...