I guess I have to take a day of from work to read all of this new messages… 
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My guess is Llama LeChuck who presides over the Isle of the Ghost Llamas
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Do you think that the character at the window, in the Melee screenshot, is the shopkeeper?
He doesn’t resemble him very much, in my opinion. If it’s him, it would be a hint at how the new design will interpret the old characters.
I assumed he was the shopkeeper at first, because that’s his building , and because of the white hair. Then again: 1) he has no beard 2) he has a lot more hair 3) he’s got demonic eyes.
While the lack of beard and hair could be irrelevant because they may be part of the new art style, the demonic eyes cannot be explained just as an art syle. It would be too much.
So he must be some kind of zombie.
He could still be a zombie shopkeeper . That can’t be ruled out. Has Lechuck turned all the inhabitants into zombies? That would make sense, in conjunction with the boarded up windows. And also because , if we revisit Melee Island , we would expect something major has changed, and this could be it: some kind of plague that turned everybody into zombies.
I don’t think that the person at the window has demonic eyes. It simply looks as though the character is wearing an eyepatch over his left eye. It’s worth noting that the storekeeper had either a glass eye, or a milky eye on the left side of his face…
If the shopkeeper had a glass eye, it changes everything. Good point. It is likely that’s the shopkeeper, then.
Edit: he does
Indeed. In fact, the person at the window appears to have a white eye drawn on top of the eyepatch, so yeah, it’s likely the storekeeper.
Then again… he has two hands.
Why keep the glass eye and not keep the hooked hand? Or maybe that’s not a hooked hand, that’s a cane:
yes, it’s a cane or a sword:
Also… the more I look, the more that doesn’t look like a reasonable way to represent a glass eye. A glass eye is not suspended in a hollow black space…
and why would he be wearing a t-shirt?
uncertain.
Indeed, that’s definitely a cane/sword, not a hooked hand.
As I already said above; it’s not a glass eye in Return to Monkey Island, it’s an eyepatch with a drawing of a glass eye on top of it. Therefore, it seems likely that between the events of the first game and this new one, the storekeeper lost his glass eye, purchased an eyepatch to replace it and drew a glass eye onto the eyepatch because he missed having his glass eye and liked the way it looked. Alternatively, it’s simply a stylised way of depicting a glass eye within an game with extremely stylised art.
Either way, my theory makes way more sense than it being demonic eyes because the eye on the right hand side of his face is normal. Why would he have one demonic eye and one normal one?
Because people don’t wear the same outfit every single day of their life?
yes, in this case it makes sense to have a glass eye on top of an eyepatch…
and indeed I see what look like the contours of an eyepatch.
maybe it’s the t-shirt he got from defeating the sword master 
what do you mean? in the screenshot, I don’t see the eye on the right hand side of the face…
Are you viewing the screenshot on your mobile phone? I can clearly see the normal eye on the right hand side of his face (bearing in mind that a “normal” eye as established within the art style for Return to Monkey Island is a single dot). Even if you can’t see the dot, surely you can acknowledge that there isn’t a large black area on the right hand side of his face? Ergo, it’s an eyepatch on the left hand side of his face.
I need to find the image in a better definition. … that looks like an in profile image to me…
But how are we supposed to recognize them, then? 
(And while I say that half-jokingly, it’s a problem I’m actually facing in real life. Bad eyesight be damned!)
I’ve taken the image, loaded it into Photoshop, zoomed in and made use of the sharpen filter…
You can see that the character’s left hand eye is squinted (it is an old person after all), as represented by a single horizontal black line.
Having now viewed the character this closely, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s either a stylised representation of a glass eye or an eyepatch with a drawing of a glass eye upon it. I now lean towards the former (a stylised representation of a structural recess within the face and a glass eye).
Looks like the old guy’s old gal, that’s my guess. That’s granny hair if I’ve ever seen it.
Yes, I see the squinted left eye now. Amazing
can you post the unfiltered high-res image?
That’s what I first thought upon originally seeing this screenshot and it’s certainly a possibility. In fact, when viewing the character closeup, that looks less like a T-shirt and more like a dress…
Yep…
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yep, that’s definitely a three-quarter image, with a squinted eye.
so it’s probably the shopkeeper.
but this closely, it doesn’t look like an eypatch anymore. more like two grey eyebrows than a single strap of an eyepatch. And then, the black hollow space is a puzzle again.
And that long vertical nose … weird. previously I didn’t recognize it as a nose.
it will be hard to relate with characters drawn that way…
Yep, those are definitely eyebrows and I too no longer think it’s an eyepatch. It’s a glass eye.
I think that’s a stylised representation of a recess within the facial structure of the character.
At this point, I wonder why they didn’t go all the way and make Monkey Island like this:
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