Despite helping create modern geek culture as we know it today with Star Wars, George Lucas himself had never attended a single Comic-Con in San Diego in its fifty-year history. Until 2025, that is. And it wasn’t his space fantasy saga that finally brought him to Hall H. He came to promote his major passion project of the last decade — the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set to open in Los Angeles in 2026. Joining him on the panel were Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, who is on the museum’s board of directors, and Lucasfilm concept artist Doug Chiang. Moderating the SDCC panel with del Toro and George Lucas was musician and sci-fi superfan Queen Latifah. You can watch the full 44-minute panel below:
George Lucas co-founded his Museum of Narrative Art with his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson. The project was first announced in 2017, and cities like San Francisco and Chicago turned it down. Los Angeles finally became the home city of the museum. Since film is a big component of narrative art the museum celebrates, it’s only fitting that it’s adjacent to Hollywood. All the art on display will be narrative in nature, meaning film, comics, magazine illustrations, even cave paintings. Anything that uses art as a storytelling format. So, probably no Jackson Pollock on display. In Lucas’ own words from the SDCC panel, this will become “Sort of a temple to the people’s art.” And this temple, designed by Ma Yansong, looks like a spaceship landing in the middle of L.A.
The panel opened with a video narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, which gave the fans in Hall H a sneak peek at the museum. Which, of course, contains many Star Wars items from the Lucasfilm archives. Among the other items in the museum from Lucas’ own collection is the first drawing of Flash Gordon from 1934. Also, several original panels of Charlie Brown comics from artist Charles Schulz, and early Marvel drawings, including Black Panther. Unlike most celebrity art collectors, Lucas revealed at the SDCC panel that he never sold any of his acquisitions. Now, the 81-year-old icon says, “What am I going to do with it all? I refuse to sell it. I could never do that.”
Del Toro’s own home, “Bleak House,” also has a metric ton of art from film and comics he’s collected. But after nearly losing them in the fires that raged in Southern California earlier this year, he revealed that “Now that the museum exists, a lot of it may go there.” It’s fitting that Comic-Con is where this panel occurred, as comics are a huge part of modern storytelling art. Guillermo del Toro reminded the crowd, “Comics were the first ones to punch Nazis. Before movies.” Doug Chiang, now a production designer at Lucasfilm, said he got into art via inspiration from comics as a child.
Toward the end of the SDCC panel, Lucas said, “Society cannot exist without a common belief system. And that’s where illustration is vital to show you what that means in everyday life. Science fiction is a myth, but we have made it real. Humans made it real because of science fiction books and art that makes people say, ‘Oh, we could go to the moon,’ and once that idea is implemented, then we believe we could do it… (In science fiction) you can’t depend on what we know, but you can be inspired by what we think we know.”
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public sometime in early 2026.
Content shared from nerdist.com.