233: Method or Madness?

FREE for visitors: 1 b/w drawing
ACOLYTES and higher: 1 featured full color multi-paneled artwork + 1 shaded work in progress drawing
DISCIPLES and higher: 1 full color artwork + 1 works in progress (2 stages of execution) + 1 b/w sketch

For more details on membership tiers, ways to support the site and how to purchase comics/collections, click here. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. 

Dear Patrons,

Here at Forbidden Feast, we do enjoy traversing through moments in history and for yours truly, I am revisiting a piece that had been sitting incomplete for years which also began as a commission and long since abandoned. This update is also a familiar character's exploration into the past, touching on the historical figure, Elizabeth Bathory, one of history's earliest known serial killers. We hope you enjoy this fare!

Click on the link below to join Forbiddenfeast on Discord:
This link is viewable to ACOLYTE, DISCIPLE members or higher & valid for a month as of 15 June 2022. If the link has expired, message me and I'll create a new link.
 

Bon appétit!

I. THE MAD COUNTESS

"Oh, my Queen. It brings me so much joy and honour that I can nourish you with my youth. I hope that I am pretty enough for you.

My dear child, yes you are young, fresh, and beautiful. I will nourish myself on your lush gifts with relish!"

A continuation of the discussion between members of the Doe Patrol's and the "Mad" Scholar after his Book Reading (as seen in Carte du Jour #209)

Some believed Erzsébet had been a witch who could bring the girls she murdered back to life so that they could keep her company. Then there are those who also see her as a mad sociopath talking to people who weren't there. Had it been a byproduct of her diet, this madness? After all, you've heard about the neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease which some scholars say is caused by eating human flesh.

You may choose to believe me or not, but I believe that it's as much a cautionary fairy tale from so-called scientists as any other Brothers Grimm stories to scare us off from trying this forbidden diet as much as AIDS had been used to scare us off from promiscuity and homosexuality. , but I believe, the benefits had also been miraculous since for a woman of the time who was in her 50's, from historical accounts, she had looked as if she had been 20 years younger.

The notion had seemed crazy for a while. Old wives tales, myths and legends, Hansel and Gretel, Baba Yaga, of the horrible witch who stole children to eat, but this countess had been real. The full extent of her horrors have since been buried. Perhaps they are much more worse than the reality or maybe it had been trumped up accusations to bring down the reputation of a powerful woman, akin to a witch hunt. Who truly knows now? As far as I know, what ritual sacrifices that mad countess performed on those poor young wenches, I believe the secret elite are doing today, perpetuating the barbaric rituals of the past. Both men and women. The men, the motives are more obvious. It may be carnal pleasures that pushes the boundaries beyond mere sexual intercourse. For the woman, it could be twofold, both a sense of jealousy and resentment to her more youthful peers, to destroy and dominate a fellow female who would remind her of a youth she lost, while at the same time, a possible means to recapture that lost beauty in her past.

We think ourselves as civilized folk these days, what with our cellphones, fancy restaurants and organic cruelty-free aisles in the supermarkets. Whether we are poor helpless villagers back in the day or poor helpless baristas who can't change a lighbulb to save their lives, all that shows is that since time immemorial, we, the people, still are sleeping sheep oblivious to the predators who would pick us off one by one in the night. 

Sometimes, the real and horrible truth slips out if you paid attention. Open your eyes and ears to what has been covered and hidden. There, you will find the truth.

-- to be continued? --

II. Facing the Horrors of the Situation

Would a member of the Circle be able to bear the fact that their food has eyes, a mouth and a face, not just a red-yellow-and-white marble patterned piece of block on the counter? This next artwork, a fully colored version of a previous black & white sketch is now available for DISCIPLE level members and higher to explore.

Bonus Sketches & Works in Progress:

A gift basket (2 artwork progressions of a similar scene), pulled long pork (1 black & white sketch), hoof & trotters (2 artwork progressions of a similar scene) galore!