The man in the last panel is based on a “monatto”, a public worker (usually a criminal) who’d go around the city gathering the bodies of black death victims.
“Bring out yer dead”!
Most people know of the term from the presence of ‘monatti’ in alessandro manzoni’s “i promessi sposi” (‘the bethroted) which has scenes set in a medieval Milano besieged by the black death.
Three lowlifes and the prince they kidnapped try to survive in a bizarre world full of cannibal killer gnomes, sinister plague doctors and things that go bump in the night.
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