The Secret Origin of Minion Maze

by Bobby Timony

Minion Maze can trace its murky origins all the way back to October, 2001 when I was working at the Forest of Fear Haunted Mansion in Tuxedo NY. We would camp in the woods during the day and work the Fear at night, but some of the character designs go back even farther.

An early sketch of the goblin who would become Bork.

Here’s Lowly Sniveling Bork making his first comics appearance as an army of goblins in “Sir Plunket”, a comic I drew in 1999.

During our downtime at the Forest of Fear, Peter and Rob Pedini and I would come up with awesome ideas for movies and comics and plays and even games.

I came up with a board game that had an ever-changing maze as it’s central mechanic. Each player would have five guys they could send out into the maze, changing it and exploring it as they went. The object was to locate three magic items with which to destroy the wandering Minotaur and to also destroy the other players. I called it “Minion Maze”.

A sketch of Malatar the Evil Minotaur

Originally, the pieces were colored beads, but I soon assigned a theme and made little paper guys for each team. The blue team were knights, the red team were dragons, and so on.

These are some of the original design sketches for Minion Maze the Board Game.

I’m not sure what happened to the fifth goblin. That file seems to be missing.

I sat on the Minion Maze idea for a while, tweaking it every now and then. Eventually, I revisited the concept and decided that since each team had five guys, it’d be cooler if there were five different guys instead of the same guy in five different poses.

I kept the themes for the most part, designing five different characters for each team. The Gold team got the biggest overhaul. Only Lumbert the Gnome bears any resemblance at all to his original incarnation.

The Knights of the Blue Bullseye

The Goblins of the Greenwood

The White Winged Angel Warriors

The Blackwater Swamp Slugs

The Redrock Dragon Goons

The Golden Glen Faerie Legion

The Scarecrows of Orange County

The Purple Ant People of Molehill Mountain

More time went by, and I found myself at a 24 hour comics event. I came up with a story idea about a young Minotaur, and called in some of my Minion Maze characters to play a part in his adventure. You can read it for free here.

Page one of “Tor the Mini-tar”

Now that I had taken the next step, and used some of the characters in an actual story, more story ideas suggested themselves to me. I wanted to do a Minion Maze comic really badly, but there were so many characters to pick from, I was kind of at a loss as to what to do with them all.

Late at night, story bits would occur to me. During my subway commute, I’d get a cool scene idea, or a scrap of dialogue. I took notes and made sketches.

Eventually, a story began to suggest itself. I took my ideas to Peter and our pal, Chant Macleod, and they helped me focus it into actual scenes and scripts.

The Many Faces of Dannikka the Elf

Minion Maze, the Comic was finally on it’s way to being a reality!

These drawings were penciled by me and inked by Danielle Corsetto, who has a great webcomic called “Girls with Slingshots”. Danielle also colored the sketch of Dannikka.