Doors
Doorways are a simple way to create a frame-within-a-frame in a photo or artwork. This can direct the eye of the viewer towards a subject, and it can create an emotional context – isolation, distance, a sense of being locked out. Filmmakers love this trick, with the final shot of John Ford's The Searchers being the biggest example.
The Searchers came to mind when I saw this David Schleinkofer artwork while researching my last post.
It's from a 1980s Science Digest Magazine article on space travel to Mars, and the lifeless desert background is pretty much as the same as the background from the similar Searchers doorway shot.
It got me thinking about the different ways that doors play a role in retro sci-fi art, and so I convinced myself that this is different enough from my Portals post that I can justify collecting a lot of cool sci-fi doorways.
Here's ‘Doorway to Reason,’ by Stanislaw Fernandes.
Two of the great French comics artists have panels illustrating the tactile weight of a good massive door. This 1978 panel by Moebius shows how hard one can be to open –
– and this 1976 panel by Philippe Caza depicts a good solid slam. I haven't researched the source material, but I can safely assume that the guy there is John Wayne at the end of The Searchers.
Tim White has perhaps the best door in retro sci-fi art with his 1979 cover for The Day After Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein. It's elegant, streamlined, and if you make it your phone lock screen, you'll be greeted by a little green wizard giving you a rose every time you open your phone.
The doors-as-portals theme is hard to escape. David B Mattingly's 1990 cover for Brad Ferguson's The World Next Door is a classic example. The plot features a parallel universe where the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't turn out so well.
It reminds me of Tony Masero's 1977 cover to Web of Everywhere, a John Brunner novel about a world in which teleportation was invented and made accessible around the globe with no security measures, leading to the collapse of civilization.
The door theme was used for an earlier edition as well, the 1974 Bantam title. The artist for this one is uncredited, but it certainly looks like my man Dean Ellis, who continues his run as the least-credited cover artist out there.
This cool 1977 NAMM brochure, scanned by Retro Synth Ads, is designed to be opened up to display a new version of a scene that can only be glimpsed when it's closed. Here, the door symbolism serves to nudge the viewer towards the action they should take.
Check out the closed version, followed by the wider open version.
The uncredited April 1983 issue of Starblazer #95 features the grandiose Gate to Yesterday.
Fantasy art has some interesting doors as well, like Darrel K. Sweet's 1981 Lord of the Rings illustration depicting “The West Door of Moria.”
Frank Frazetta was a confirmed fan of the ending shot in The Searchers. I suspect he was thinking about it when positioning the zombie in this illustration, his June 1965 cover to Creepy Magazine #3.
Music rec: Here, have 24+ hours of '90s music.
Next Time: The Condec Annual Report 1969