Welcome to Eltingville: BG Design - Joe's Shop, Back Wall (Patreon)

This is my rough sketch for the back wall section of Joe's comic shop. I knew I was putting more detail and texture into the shop roughs than would translate to the actual background art, but I figured if I went crazy on it more of it would survive in the pilot. And they did keep a lot of the design elements I put into the backgrounds, simplified, of course, but still way more made it into the backgrounds than I expected. I really appreciated that.

I felt that Joe's shop really needed to show a sense of sloppy disorder, clutter and neglect. I based it on all the bad comic shops I'd ever been in, just like Joe was based on the bad retailers and dealers I'd dealt with as a fan and professional. Folding tables and comic boxes used as fixtures, old stock sitting for years, brittle signs taped to walls, stained carpeting, a bathroom from hell doubling as storage space. It's exaggerated as a whole piece but not far from comic shop reality. Comic shops had been parodied in movies and on TV, most notably the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, but it always bugged me that the shop was neat and orderly. I really wanted to convey a sense of chaos and apathy, that the space was an extension of Joe's house, a disheveled kingdom filled with old, unsellable stock, yellowing plastic bags and molding carboard. As long as he got to sit behind the counter and lord over customers, the state of the shop itself didn't matter. Environment feeds character, and Joe's Fantasy World needed to be an unwashed disaster area filled with comics, collectibles and clutter.