Door Number Three: Behind the Scenes

Door Number Three had an extremely fast turnaround time. It started on a Thursday morning in a group chat between myself, Grumpy-TG, and NotZackForWork (Zi for short). Grumpy brought up the idea of creating a new concept for the TG community to play with. A simple idea like Spells R Us or The Great Shift that could apply to many TG scenarios. We started brainstorming and quickly landed on the premise of a transformative third option to a hard decision in normal life. Sort of an 'opt out of reality' angle. We knew it was going to be a door that the subject would open and we knew it was going to be ambiguously magical and technological. The timer aspect was just introduce a little bit of narrative pressure to the situation.

So the next step was to design the door. As you can see in the first image, we went through a few iterations as the concept grew. We took inspiration from the set decoration for Let's Make a Deal as well as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's interiors. We wanted something monolithic that doesn't look like it was manufactured or conjured. It just is. Each of the sketches are labelled with the first letter of the artist who drew it. Zi ended up being the MVP here and made some kickass designs, but the whole process was very collaborative.

With the door designed, we had our concept pretty much done. The only thing left to do was to make comics to show it off! Grumpy leapt into action and I followed close behind. By Saturday morning I had four pages completely finished. I wanted to juxtapose a very mundane world with a very fantastical one. In central Florida there is a chain of tex-mex restaurants called Tijuana Flats. I used to go there all the time with my mom as a kid. They were special because each restaurant had its own custom mural and aesthetic. The second picture I posted is the actual mural that I used to look at all the time while eating my burrito. I wanted to channel that energy, this sort of blown-out sci-fi, fantasy, Heavy Metal-but-graffiti, prog rock album aesthetic. I ended up with a world I would describe as "What if Alex Toth painted a wizard van?" (Alex Toth was an illustrator and the designer for Space Ghost, The Herculoids, Super Friends, and other 70s cartoons).

This project turned around in three days and I am very happy to be able to share it with you, my lovely patrons. Please use the concept in your own comics or fiction or fantasies or whatever! Just remember to credit us if you do! Thanks!