Ornicus Orca is a large format comic book illustrated by Simon Thompson. The comic opens with several panels of the titular killer whale, leaping and splashing before the setting sun, all the ocean majesty. Cut to a sex scene between a veiny red man and a pink woman. Cut to the same two, armed with guns and knives, charging into battle. You’ll note plenty of speech bubbles—all of them are blank. And now a man who looks like bubblegum, a yellow dog-person, a human-alligator hybrid, tearing away in a station wagon. Everyone is oddly muscular. The whale is back, now with arms and legs (also ripped.) Gunplay, a passionate kiss, triumph—an ending made for TV.
At the end of the comic is a poster—double-sided in French and English—with text for the empty speech bubbles, numbered to fill in the blanks from the comic’s pages. Pulling out the poster and reading along with the pictures doesn’t help comprehension too much. As it turns out, Ornicus Orca might tell the story of a battle between a group of communists and a group of liberation theologists: “WE HAD TO MAKE A STOP AT THE CHURCH. WE ALL AGREED WE NEEDED TO HAVE OUR GUNS BLESSED FIRST!”
The poster notes that the dialog was inspired by the film La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?, a Situationist film by René Vienet, which dubbed over a Hong Kong martial arts film to transform it into a subversive statement. In the same way, Ornicus Orca twists tropes from action comics and movies into something surreal, bizarre, and hilarious.