The Pestilent Prince

Still the working title, but this has been its name for a long time and so...

Here we are, and I am terrified. The idea for this story has been in my head for almost a decade, and the characters have been my quiet muses for years. I put things that I love into this story just to have an excuse to draw it. A lot of what inspires me as an artist lives inside of this story. 

This is terrifying because I am finally ready to share it.

It all started with a book called 'Disease' by Mary Dobson. I always had this morbid fascination with history's portrayal of death and disease. The days when the 'Black Death' killed a quarter of the world's population, and something like syphilis was romanticized. How Plague Doctors stuffed their masks with roses and camphor to keep out the stench of the dead and consumption was called, 'King's Evil'. 

There is a painting in the book, 'Syphilis' by Richard Tennant Cooper that personifies the disease as something beautiful and macabre. So from that came the idea that all diseases could be personified in that way, and King Cholera became the first character I created. (Fun fact: 'King Cholera' is actually the name the British used for Cholera during an outbreak in the 1830s)

From there I created eight other characters after diseases and gave each a noble title, with the tenth being a plague doctor, or 'The Pestilent Prince'. That makes him seem like the main character, but I never really intended for any of them to be the protagonist/antagonist, and this is one of the reason 'The Pestilent Prince' is a working title. They all have stories to tell and are all pieces of a whole. There are also more than ten characters, but more on that later...

For now I want to show you the mood boards I made for the ten 'diseased'. While I tried to be vague on how most of the characters will eventually look, some of them like Lady Typhoid are unavoidably obvious. The inspiration for her was Waterhouse's redheads, and Renaissance paintings of Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott. Some of the other boards, like Duke of Syph and Judge Scurvy, are very deceptive. I also want you to pay attention to the color of the horses, how many there are and the boards that they belong to...

I will go over the details of each character in future posts, but until then, I hope these boards leave you at least a little curious. Larger versions are attached at the bottom of the post!