Marko Djurdjevic has spent three decades shaping worlds across comics, video games and film. An illustrator, author and creative director, the SIXMOREVODKAfounder is known for his Marvel artwork, including covers for Daredevil, Thor and Spider-Man, alongside his work on the tabletop role-playing universe Degenesis. Now, he is bringing ORKEN to Lucca Comics & Games 2026, a new project that draws on his decades of industry experience while allowing him to craft a world entirely his own.
For Djurdjevic, the return represents the culmination of an idea that predates its initial unveiling at Lucca in 2017. ORKEN explores first contact between humans and orcs, favouring cultural conflict and the human condition over familiar fantasy conventions. Drawing on decades of experience, Djurdjevic has taken responsibility for everything from writing and illustration to graphic design and production.
Ahead of the festival, CGMagazine spoke with Djurdjevic about bringing ORKEN to a wider audience, the challenges of building a universe on his own terms and why Lucca remains such a meaningful destination for him.
So, just to get started, you’re coming to Lucca Comics & Games and bringing a lot of exciting things with you. What are you most excited about when it comes to attending the festival and meeting so many people who love your work?
Marko Djurdjevic: Personally, I’ve just finished a two-year marathon working on this big creator-owned universe, and it’s the first time I’m showing it off in public. We had a very successful Kickstarter campaign that we launched in March and finally delivered everything. And so this is the first time that we’re bringing what our audience already knows, our core audience already knows, to the major public.
And I love the Lucca convention. It’s a beautiful space. It’s a lot of people. Been there several times. We always have good sales as well. I have a good, strong community over there. So just being able to present that new work to that crowd is very exciting.
Now, let’s talk aboutORKEN, your big new project. How did it all come together, and what are you most excited for people to experience when they first read it?
Marko Djurdjevic: It’s a serialized fiction fantasy IP that does away with a lot of the classic fantasy tropes of magic and dragons, etc. It tries to have a more mature angle into a world that is akin to classics like All Quiet on the Western Front or Lightage, because I originally wanted to create a fantasy world that feels a lot more like our real world, in a sense.
And I always wondered why those real-world stories about the human condition are never getting really explored in the fantasy setting. And the concept of two species meeting for the first time, humans and orcs, is just so fascinating when you look at that opportunity window of first contact between two civilizations. Something like that has never really been done in fantasy.
And that is what I really wanted to bring to the forefront with this particular IP. That’s why I’m very excited to put the books in front of people and see their reactions, see what they think when they actually start going on their exploration.
I looked overORKENbefore this interview, and I have to say, there’s a real naturalness to the characters you’re showcasing. What was the challenge in creating a story that feels grounded and authentic within a fantasy universe, and how did you overcome that?
Marko Djurdjevic: Oh my God. I think as an artist and as a writer, you need to grow mature enough to not delve into cringe and end up doing the same tropes all over again, right? You want to avoid the white saviour story, and you kind of want to dodge all the bullets of the noble savage trope, etc. You need to really be able to separate those two perspectives and treat each with the right amount of care and give each of the different sides in the conflict the room to grow on their own.
So, I do think that that’s the most challenging part, and that’s what kept me from actually working on that IP for such a long time, because the original manuscript is over 25 years old. And it just lay collecting dust in my drawers for a very, very long time until I finally felt like I was mature enough as a designer and as an artist to really tackle a story like this.
Why was now the time to kind of make this jump and create the world of ORKEN?
Marko Djurdjevic: Well, this year is my 30th anniversary as an entertainment artist. I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for three decades, and I felt like, hey, this is the right moment to finalize my anniversary and put a little bit of that legacy cream over everything that I’ve done in the past. Because I’ve worked on movies, I worked on comic books, I worked on video games, plenty of them throughout the years, but it was always somebody else’s property.
And I do feel like the collective knowledge that I’ve gathered over the last three decades deserves to be put into your own thing, where you can challenge yourself to all the obstacles and all the things that you have learned over your entire career to create something entirely new and put all those skills into action, pretty much.
Do you see this becoming a long-running series, or do you already have a specific end point in mind? Is there a moment where you know, “This is where the story ends,” or do you want to see where the fandom and the response to it take things?
Marko Djurdjevic: So, we just published wave one, which is a total of 14 products that I’ve put together over the last 18 months. I’m now working on wave two, which is scheduled for sometime next year. I have no window yet as to when this is going to be released, and I have developed a total of three waves of books. So, I know how much time I need to finalize my take on the story, but I do see an opportunity to have it then spread into different directions as the fandom around it hopefully grows and see it create spin-offs on its own.
Now, when it comes to spin-offs, if other artists or creators wanted to jump into this universe and work within it, how willing would you be to let someone else take control of a side project? And would it feel strange handing your baby off to someone else?
Marko Djurdjevic: Not so much. As long as we can agree on stuff canonically, I do think it would be very inspiring to see somebody else touch that universe from their personal perspective and vantage point. I’m just a real big sucker for keeping the canon proper because that is the one thing that kills it for me in other IPs.
As soon as you bring too many cooks into the kitchen, everybody does something else, and then people are contradicting themselves in the story, and it just becomes a hot mess. I do like when there is some editorial oversight as to not break the canon. That is really the core principle of creating an IP: keeping it all consistent throughout.
Do you have a lore bible that you created before jumping into ORKEN, laying out the rules of the universe and what any future stories would need to follow?
Marko Djurdjevic: There’s a short document that outlines the story at its core essence, and it explains some of the inner workings of the universe, and that I would need to see respected for somebody else to be able to tackle it. But it’s not a humongous bible. It’s not 500 pages or anything.
Now, just talking about your work for a moment, you’ve had a massive career spanning so many IPs, comic publishers and studios. Now you’re working on your own company and creating your own work. What do you think you’ve taken away from working on other people’s projects that you’ve brought intoORKEN, and how do you think that helps elevate it beyond just another IP?
Marko Djurdjevic: I definitely brought all the professionalism that I gathered over three decades. The ability to keep my own deadlines and the ability to know exactly how much time something takes to be able to complete it is just essential for something that is creator-owned. Because if you’re doing something for yourself and there’s no editorial oversight or no deadline looming, you can just go forever, and then it becomes an endless project.
But you need to be realistic about it. You need to know, you need to be able to forecast a book from start to finish. You need to be able to assign a certain number of pages to it, a certain number of illustrations, and then work backwards from there and do the math.
How much time is this realistically going to take? How much production value will it have by the time it’s done? And how many copies do you need to sell to make a buck? So, you gotta be a full-on pro if you want to do this right. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark and hoping that something will stick.
That makes perfect sense.I’m reading that this is a transmedia release. Why did you choose to go that route rather than release it as a standard trade paperback or novel?
Marko Djurdjevic: I’ll tell you exactly why. Because in my career, I always get hired just for one particular skill, never for all the skills at once. And the only way for me to apply all my skills to one particular project is to start it as broadly as possible, so as to make it as challenging as possible for myself in the process. Because I will never know if I can be a good writer, a good artist, a good art director, a good graphic designer, a good product manager, a good product designer, a good producer, if I don’t assign it all to myself.
I just need to have that feeling of, “Wow, this is really challenging on every aspect of creation.” And because it’s really challenging, I finally have the feeling that I’m really reaching my potential as a human being rather than being…hired for 20% of the skill sets that I bring to the table.
Now, you mentioned all your skill sets going into this one project. After doing that, did you find, “Oh, wow, this one thing I’m really challenged at,” or, “This one thing I just absolutely love,” or did you just want to dive in and just do it all?
Marko Djurdjevic: I wanted to dive into it and do it all because, after 30 years, you really want to see how far you can take something. If you learn so many things on the side as your career progresses over the years, and you never have the chance or the ability to bring it all together into one product, you just find that the most attractive thing in the world. It’s much more attractive to work on something holistically than in a compartmentalized way.
Now, jumping back to Lucca, what do you feel Lucca Comics & Games does that other festivals don’t, especially with the way it brings comics, gaming, tabletop, movies and music together into one massive citywide festival?
Marko Djurdjevic: It does a lot of things for us as creators in terms of giving us the room to expose ourselves to a very, very large crowd. I do think, for Europe, this is probably the biggest convention out there, and just being able to put your work in front of so many different eyes is absolutely great exposure.
So that’s why I always yearn to go there. The other thing is the atmosphere of the festival is just incredible. I don’t know if you’ve been, but I’ve been several times and good Lord, I just love being there. It doesn’t feel like a convention. It feels like a vacation where you get to work on the side. So, really, that’s what it comes down to. I’ve made a ton of friends with the organizers over there over the years, and locals in the city, and so I just really like going there for personal reasons. It fills me with joy, so to speak.
I know exactly what you mean. Every year, I see so many people enjoying whatever fandom or interest they love. They fully immerse themselves in it and just want to bring other people into that experience.
Marko Djurdjevic: Yeah. Yeah.
For people coming to Lucca who are interested in seeing this work, why should they be excited aboutORKEN? What makes it something they should seek out, whether that means picking up the books or exploring some of the other media connected to it?
Marko Djurdjevic: Because it’s a fully authentic universe done by one person from start to finish. Imagine Tolkien had the ability to draw Lord of the Rings next to just writing it. Imagine him being also a great graphic designer and being able to typeset it perfectly and create his own logos.
I just think there’s some magic in artistic work that is done so thoroughly by one person. You just want to get swept away by somebody’s vision and by their thoroughness of bringing all that together and orchestrating that into a lineup of products. Not just one product, but 13, 14 that you can just pick up.
That’s awesome. Now, leaving on this, ifORKEN does become a world phenomenon, what would you like to see? A video game? Would you like to see a movie? Would you like to see it all? Or do you want to keep it within kind of a literary kind of media?
Marko Djurdjevic: We already worked on the demo for the video game. It’s already out on Steam.
Oh, that’s awesome.
Marko Djurdjevic: So, we did that on the side. We’d love to see that video game continued, but for that we need outside investment. I’d love to see it go into animation. But for that, also outside investment. It’s nothing that I can pay out of pocket.
Brendan Frye: Awesome.
Marko Djurdjevic: But yeah, for sure, I would love to see it spread into all kinds of different media and get re-explored and re-envisioned in the process.
Thank you so much for your time. I’m excited to see the book, and I’m excited to get back to Lucca. Hopefully, people are just as excited as I am to check outORKEN.
Lucca Comics & Gamestakes place from October 28, 2026, to November 1, 2026. You can learn more about ORKEN, including where to buy it, on the official site here, and check out the Steam demo here.
