Ufthak Blackhawk is back, bigger, smarter and better, with the Big Dakka, the long awaited sequel to Brutal Kunnin from the mohawk’d head of Mike Brooks. This time, the Orks find themselves on the wrong side of the tracks, delivering comic violence in the overwrought saturday morning cartoon villany of Commoragh, determined to find fancy loot, a big fight and a way out.
I loved Brutal Kunnin. It’s absolutely one of my favourite Black Library books, an absolute classic. Fun, funny, interesting, great on the ol’ shooty-shooty and full of mechanicus shenanigans as well as Orks bein’ Orky. Though I enjoyed Warboss (a lot, actually), I wanted more Ufthak and now, finally, we’ve got it. Da Big Dakka is absolutely a worthy sequel, transplanting the same beats that worked so well in Brutal Kunnin into a new environment against new foes, and picking up some new ones along the way.
If you’ve read Brutal Kunnin you know – at least vaguely – what you’re going to get here, and if you’ve read anything else by Mike Brooks you know the level of quality you’re going to get. He’s consistently one of the most interesting Black Library authors, and everything that comes out of his pen/keyboard/dictaphone (I dunno how he writes and should probably have checked before embarking on this sentence) is at the very least worth reading, and at best an absolutely essential Black Library read. That’s quite a fun place to be as a reviewer – Brooks is good, pacing and plot are excellent, he writes really well, character development happens, always a different perspective, always an ally to the LGBT community, I’ll recommend everything he writes – so now I get to talk about something else. That’s good, because Da Big Dakka is, in a very orky way, Ded Funny.
Orks Are Funny
Structurally, this is a very similar book to Brutal Kunnin and that’s all to the good. There’s an Ork plot, as Ufthak gets bigger, smarter and more vicious, an antagonist plot and a third one – in Brutal Kunnin the Iron Warrior Surprise, and in the Big Dakka a wannabe Grot revolutionary. They’re balanced well, checking in with each point of view in turn with plot mostly driven forward by the Orks – as is right and proper – while the Eldar and Grot chapters tend to provide another perspective on whatever just happened to Ufthak. A lot of the comedy and joy of these books comes in how those plotlines interact – or, more accurately, don’t. The Orks do what the Orks do, and there’s nothing that really stands in their way for any length of time. Perhaps a puzzle needs to be solved with violence or Orky tech, or someone needs krumpin’, but the Orks are very much an irresistible force in these books which works out to be great fun.
While it’s definitely an Ork book, it’s probably about 40% Drukhari, another of the galaxy’s dastardly Xenos species that Mike Brooks has an excellent handle on. Lelith Hesperax: Queen of Knives is a great read too, and Mike clearly enjoys writing everyone’s favourite sadistic murder elves. The Drukhari here are a lot of fun, brought in with a much lighter touch (while keeping their horrific threat and Machiavellian intelligence) than other writers have found with them. They really are Saturday morning cartoon villains; all big hair, queer coding, nonsense plans and “I’ll get you next time, Ufthak Blackhawk!”, while simultaneously having feelings, character development, a “can love bloom on the battlefield” running throughline that the romantasy/fanfiction shippers will adore, and all-present-and-correct codex-approved unit and weapon choices. I really like the glancing looks we get at different 40k cultures in the process of them being flattened by Orks, and there are surprisingly deep – even slightly touching – side plots in both books.
Of course these aren’t just little ethnographic studies with a throughline plot, but much of the engine that makes Brutal Kunnin and Da Big Dakka work as comedies. You need these side plots for the fun to happen because they exist solely to react to the ever-growing mayhem of the Orks. Watching the intricate schemes of the Drukhari get literally and repeatedly torn apart by enemies who aren’t even really paying attention is straight-up funny. Every time there’s a villain reveal, plot within plot, or attempt to play three-dimensional chess, a big Ork fist smashes through it. These aren’t long books, so it happening several times in Big Dakka isn’t repetitive or boring. The plots escalate, the defence becomes more desperate, the Orkish violence follows suit. The contrast makes the Orks work, as much as it provides humour. A full book of Orkish violence gets a bit stale. A full book of Orkish talking ends up hitting the law of diminishing returns after a while – every bit of consonant droppin’ starts a clock racing to finish the story before mockney accents wear thin – so returning to the Drukhari and their increasing exasperation with Orkish psychology freshens us up, making the slam back into comic book megaviolence that the opposition just cannot deal with, feel fun and new every time. If we never check in with these characters and these worlds again, good! They exist to provide a contrast, a straight man, a punching bag, for the main characters and, just like the Waaagh, once the Orks move on, they’re left behind.
It also lets Brooks mine a lot of humour – subtle and otherwise – out of different environments and situations beyond the Orks. The humour from Ork stuff tends to be slapstick – someone loses an arm and everyone laughs, something blows up in a humorous way, Ufthak remarks on something da humies do dat’s weird – or from metatextual knowledge (Princess the Squig coming from a mis-read Titan Princeps name plate is a good example here). There’s room for subtle humour there, but there’s spaces that Orks can’t really occupy that can be mined for more. In Brutal Kunnin, Adeptus Mechanicus meetings allowed a poke at middle-management and sexism in the workplace, while Big Dakka takes pointless over-complicated planning and paranoia to ridiculous places, all to great effect. The contrast is, perhaps, not quite as funny as last time – both the Mechanicum and Dark Eldar are great, extreme contrasts to the otherwise straightforward Orks, but the latter are also weird violent sadists – but it still works, and I’d be very surprised if the next book in this series (come on man, let’s get to it!) didn’t follow this very effective structure.
Orks Aren’t Funny
Orks, despite their occasionally darker turns and efforts to balance humour and terror, often end up as comic relief for 40k, and I think that’s worth having a look at. They’re set up to hit a lot of different types of humour – slapstick, as we’ve already noted, is never that far away. They’re self-and-others deprecating, there’s usually a little verbal wit in there even if it’s the blunt answer to a complicated question, puns, catchphrases, double-entendres abound, and they have pitch-black humour in spades because it’s all about killing, and sometimes eating, people that look like us. They’re the threatening Ogre in the Cave as well as – still – being the kind of send up of working class British hooligan culture that middle class writers in Nottingham would write in the 80s-90s. They do a lot of work in 40k to provide both threat and hapless victim, a more-or-less morally neutral force that does a lot of fightin’ and dyin’ and can be used in virtually any context. It’s a fairly complex house of cards to keep balanced. Orks should be slightly funny, we need that in a pretty dour universe, but they also need to be scary and threatening. The fact that a vehicle can be called a Boomdakka Snazzwagon (and that a Drukhari Archaon can say, “You’re just making that name up!”) while remaining threatening isn’t always a balance that’s been struck well.
Brooks hits the nail on the head in his Ork novels. His Orks have a certain lightness of touch that feels right and treads a very fine line. There’s a fight in this book that’s very important to the series – and a long time coming – and it’s as serious and consequential as anything gets. Even in that, there’s time to wonder at the comedic potential of Orkish technology, a little nod to, “That’s Orks, folks!” in the midst of the meat hitting the metal. My (ebook) copy of Big Dakka included an excerpt from Gazghkull – a novel I enjoyed – and it reminded me of how the Orks can be quite dour, serious and traumatic. I don’t think Orks played wholly and completely for comedy works that well in a grimdark hell; it’s a bit like Groucho writing the middle section of the Communist Manifesto – wrong man in the wrong book – but neither does an all-serious all-trauma Ork world.
When we’re firmly rooted in Uthank’s head, we strike that balance perfectly. He is a reliable, and occasionally slightly puzzled, narrator, one with a clear moral compass (it’s good to fight people capable of a fight), a clear set of desires (fightin’), and the tools and knowledge to pull those together. What he pulls together is grim – and he grows from a lucky nob into a terrifying monster. The world he exists in is absolutely one of grey areas and confusion and big things with horrible sharp teeth that live in the warp, but in his head it’s all beakies, spikies and umies and everyone is out for a laugh and a fight, no matter that he himself is a looming monster bringing death and destruction in his unstoppable wake. What he does is Warhammer at its most violent, of course, but he does it with a clear head. You laugh along when something funny-violent happens, enlightened by a head cleared by the waaagh and a heart full of…. Well, also Waaagh, I guess.
Orks have been through many iterations over the years and I think Brooks is firmly pulling them into a good place. They’ve been evil, they’ve been a pretty straight parody of the British right (Stormtroopers being ork babyfash was a good bit but out of context it’s just weird), they’ve been an existential threat and they’ve been whatever the hell the Saga of the Beast was – perhaps best left forgotten – and now they’re in a much more useful space, pulling much from all of that to form an unstoppable, brutal (and kunnin), but in their way not unkind, force in the galaxy. That’s been present for a while, a strong throughline in Codexes and other material for a couple of editions, but I think Brooks has the clearest view of it. You can’t trust Orks, you never know what they’re going to do, they’ll continually surprise you and they’ll kick your teeth in, but you know they – at least – will be laughing as it happens. While Brutal Kunnin has you laugh along, Da Big Dakka is more threatening – darker, cleverer, and dangerous. Here, our slightly comedic hero of the previous book is transformed by his own success (and Ork steroids) into a genuine threat, the final lines capping it off with a growling malignancy that reminds you – just in time – that while they’re laughing, the Orks aren’t funny in the slightest.
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