Artist's commentary
King of Spider Miles
I was going for ‘postcard that the Donquixote Family very generously sends to potential business partners in the shitty little town they chose to reside in, so the people will know what their ruler / local mafia boss pirate looks like’
Nah but, I fell for a fictional town that gets almost no screen time at all. I just love that Doflamingo picked a literal garbage dump as his base of operations, sticking his Family into this fortress-looking waste processing plant, allegedly taking in like 100 hopeful but ultimately useless kids as mobster pirate apprentices and then losing all of them because his weirdo brother beat them and threw them in the trash until they ran off crying. What an era.
The landscape of scrap heaps, smoke stacks, industrial brick buildings and the name all speak to my imagination. It’s like, Machinarium and Peaky Blinders meets Law’s Little Nightmares-esque experience of being a tiny kid in a big hat amongst HUGE monster men. Just very into the Spider Miles vibes and the potential of that place aesthetically.
I also want to know if Doflamingo could use the constant chimney smoke and smog to create sky paths. Just create spiderwebs in the sky all over town and take a little walk.