George Lucas, Narrative Art and the Mysteries of Life

“Stories are mythology, and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.”

George Lucas

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is built around precisely this idea. Opening to the public in Los Angeles on 22nd September 2026, the museum is dedicated to visual storytelling across cultures and centuries, bringing together everything from ancient visual narratives and traditional illustration to comics, cinematic art and digital media.

George Lucas first entered my life when I was just eleven years old. The first Star Wars movie launched in 1977 and I was hooked. It was so much the movie itself, it was the world that came with it. Never before in movie history could you purchase so much merchandise to recreate the Star Wars world at home. But what really had the biggest effect on me were the books and magazines. This was the first time I experienced being able to read and learn about the world building Lucas had surrounded the first part of his epic with.

I can’t quite remember where I read it at the time, but I always knew there would be nine movies, and Lucas, for some strange reason, started the saga on the fourth. More recently I discovered a post in the LA Reader from 1980 in which Lucas reportedly said: “Star Wars is really three trilogies, nine films… it won’t be finished for probably another 20 years.”

In different interviews the number of movies has ranged from nine to twelve. In a 1980 Bantha Tracks interview, an official Lucasfilm fan magazine (issue 8), Lucas said, “I cut that number down to nine because the other three were tangential to the saga.”

I purchased books of concept art, most of which were filled with the art of Ralph McQuarrie, accompanied with the story boards and/or movie script. This is what I like most, to see the thought process and making process behind the world building. I am fascinated more by the making process than the finished result. For me, as both an author and a fantasy artist, the idea behind the museum raises a fascinating question: Why have human beings always needed stories to understand the world?

It seems we are creatures of story. Long before novels existed, human beings were telling stories. We painted animals on cave walls. We carved gods into stone. We created myths about the origins of the universe, the movements of the stars, death, rebirth, love, war and the fate of the human soul. For me it is art, in all its forms, that sets us aside from the animals.

The medium may have changed, but the fundamental impulse did not. The Lucas Museum describes narrative art as a tradition extending from prehistoric cave paintings through illustration, comics, murals and cinema. Its inaugural exhibitions deliberately place ancient myths alongside more modern forms of
storytelling.⁠ That is important because we sometimes make a distinction between mythology and popular culture. We might put Greek mythology in one category, Renaissance religious paintings in another, comic books somewhere else and films such as Star Wars in yet another. But perhaps these distinctions are artificial. A myth is a story through which a culture explores what it believes to be
true, and that is precisely what stories continue to do.

Mythology doesn’t have to mean ancient religion. When we hear the word mythology, many people immediately think of Zeus, Odin, Ra or the Hindu gods. But mythology can be understood more broadly. Myths are stories that embody ideas about existence. They give form to questions that are otherwise difficult, and sometimes impossible to express directly.

The museum has been set up as a showcase for narrative art, describing it as art that illustrates stories. Lucas argues that narrative art tells the story of a society, including common beliefs that hold society together.

In the opening preface to the Taschen book to accompany the opening of the museum, Lucas writes, “In order to survive, all life forms are created with fear. Humans are especially susceptible to fear the unknown. They also have an imagination that allows them to moderate that fear with stories that make
emotional sense even if they are not true.”

This gives the illustrator a much more important role than simply creating attractive pictures. The artist becomes a visual storyteller, and an illustration doesn’t merely accompany a story but can expand it and reveal something that words leave unsaid. I have always subscribed to the idea that ‘a picture is worth a
thousand words.’

An entire civilisation can be shown in a single image. It can show us what a god looks like, or make an imaginary world feel ancient. It can make a fictional character look as though they existed before we encountered them. This is why the worlds of Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, Ralph McQuarrie and countless other artists and writers have become so influential. They didn’t just describe imaginary worlds, they gave those worlds a visual identity, and once we see them, they become difficult to forget.

It’s a well-known fact that Lucas drew upon mythology, folklore, religion and the work of Joseph Campbell when developing the Star Wars saga. But what makes Star Wars particularly interesting is the way Lucas combined ancient mythological structures with modern visual culture. The result was neither ancient mythology nor futuristic science fiction.