To close out San Diego Comic-Con with a bang, George Lucas made his first appearance at the long-running pop culture fest alongside filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and award-winning Lucasfilm designer Doug Chiang. But the panel topic wasn’t a new Star Wars project; it was the importance of keeping art accessible to the public, especially during unprecedented times, at the Lucas Museum opening next year in Los Angeles.
Fanboys, fret not, though—during a quick sizzle reel of featured works, eagle-eyed attendees were able to catch glimpses of renderings depicting a life-size Naboo Starfighter as part of the curated works. Additionally, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look at General Grievous on his wheel bike as well as concept art for Indiana Jones.
The Lucas Museum confirmed to io9 that these works are included in the museum’s collections, with more announcements to come about its inaugural installations. io9 previously reported that the collection would also include Luke’s full-size landspeeder from A New Hope, the original plans and model for the Millennium Falcon, a Darth Vader costume, and a full-sized Yoda model.
Mostly, though, the panel centered a conversation about storytelling and the importance of accessibility. “This museum is dedicated to the idea that stories, mythology—any kind of story that is written to affect people and to build community—is extremely important to society and creating societies and creating community,” Lucas explained. “Art illustrates that story, and that’s the right hand of building a community: you need the art to make it seem real. Even back in the Renaissance or the Stone Age, you’ll always have a story that people believe is mythology: it’s not really true. But people believe it and it binds them together with a common belief system. That common belief system is what is really important. And what we’re doing here with the museum is to try to make people aware of the mythology that we live by. And at the same time, let them have an emotional experience looking at art that does tell the modern mythology.”
He continued. “The art part of it is a way of making it really accessible to people and [making] it so they believe it.”
“It’s part of what we need to keep society together. Even if it’s tough, a lot of the art centers around those ideas of what we believe in and how important [it] is to us to have a community and to be able to build off of a common belief, and it’s especially true today because of the fact that the world is becoming a smaller place. There are a lot of different common beliefs out there. It used to be easy because they were far away and it was hard to get to them, to interact with that. But now, we’re experiencing, in a lot of ways, the fact that there [are] a lot of different beliefs and there’s a lot that aren’t common. And the society cannot exist without a common belief system.”
Guillermo del Toro, who serves as a member of the board, discussed the hope that the tenets of the museum will contribute to the fight for knowledge in a time where there’s rampant erasure of history. “Stories shape the world. Stories that tell you the wrong thing about who you are or what you should be to other people because one of the narrative branches that is brutally applied is propaganda. And I think that the illustration art is not only celebrating the craft of incredible people that have designed movies and art,” he said.
Del Toro went on to mention some of those great artists—including Ralph McQuarrie, Ron Cobb, and Jim Steranko—and drove the point home about the Lucas Museum’s guiding vision. “It’s also celebrating an emotional thing that belongs to all of us. Myth belongs to all of us, propaganda is controlled by a very small group. Myth unites us; propaganda divides us.”
Del Toro continued. “Popular mythology in forms of comic books of any kind—I don’t care if you like underground comics or edgy comics that have nothing to do with genre or you like a genre piece, it’s that we all can access those emotions. That’s why they don’t belong to the man, they don’t belong to the power, they don’t belong to our parents, they belong to us.”
He described the 300,000-square-foot Lucas Museum as an ark; its design by Ma Yansong features no hard edges as a way to reflect the flow of knowledge. “I think this is celebrating things that speak to all of us collectively but individually. So the size of the museum again declares this in existence in a way that is a singularity in the world right now,” del Toro said. “And [it’s] something that can celebrate that form of art.”
Academy Award-winning designer and longtime Lucasfilm collaborator Doug Chiang credited the popular arts, which San Diego Comic-Con celebrates annually, for inspiring his career path alongside access to public communal spaces that didn’t gatekeep it.
“Comic art and magazine illustration were kind of looked down upon…but it was a way for me to enjoy art, and it invited me to learn more about art,” he shared, and as an LA native whose career is due in part to a love for museums, libraries, Free Comic Book Day, and PBS, I have to agree. It’s a way for everyone, not just a select few, to look for purpose. There’s a reason why the museum is located by Lucas’ alma mater, USC. Incidentally, USC hosts the LA Times Festival of Books, where I picked up my first chapter read, Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera.
Chiang added, “It’s [George’s] gift to sort of help celebrate this, and what I really enjoy about it honestly is that you know narrative art is a way to educate kids and to sort of like validate and say, ‘It’s ok to draw your fantasy, draw things from your mind, embrace comic books.’ It shouldn’t be looked down upon, and what’s fantastic is that I think the museum—my hope is that it will inspire the next Norman Rockwell or Frank Frazetta.” Or, you know, the next Doug, Guillermo, or George.
The Lucas Museum is set to open its doors in 2026; for more information, visit here.
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