Whitebeard's Earth-Shattering Roar — Print & Oil Painting

The first thing to register is that he is already injured. A red wound runs down the centre of the chest and darkens the sash beneath it, and the torso around it is a map of old scar tissue laid in with short pale strokes. This is not a display of strength. It is a man spending the last of it.

The square format brings you far closer than a wide one would. You get the face: the white crescent moustache, the head cloth, the eyes shut and the mouth open, chin lifted, caught in the middle of a shout the title supplies and the picture cannot.

At this range the costume reads clearly. A white captain's coat with pale green and gold facings hangs open from the shoulders, its scarlet lining filling most of the lower frame, and the white trousers are ruled with fine seams. Both arms are stretched straight out with the palms open, and the veins of white energy leaving them arc up the left and right edges.

Behind the head, again, the flag: an enormous skull with the curved moustache below it, stained and pitted, filling the top of the square. In this version it hangs lower and closer, so the crest of that moustache passes just above his shoulders and appears to be resting on them.

Kept in our One Piece collection, where the wider treatment of the same figure is the horizontal version in near darkness and distance replaces the detail you get here.