Via Vulture.com:

By this point, the imagery of the Star Wars franchise has been carved into the walls of popular culture. Countless millions can picture the costumes of Darth Vader and Han Solo, the skylines of Cloud City and the Forest Moon of Endor, the metallic outlines of R2-D2 and C-3PO. But back when those icons existed only in the mind of George Lucas, he needed help turning his imagined universe into concrete images. For that he turned to a technical artist named Ralph McQuarrie.

Throughout the creation of the original Star Wars trilogy, McQuarrie painted an array of character and world designs, as well as mattes and advertisements. He wasn’t particularly well-known when he died, in 2012, though if David Mandel has his way, that’ll change. Mandel is a longtime television writer, director, and producer, perhaps best known for his work on Seinfeld (he wrote “The Bizarro Jerry,” among other episodes) and his current status as Emmy-winning showrunner for Veep. Mandel’s also a nerd of epic proportions, holding a massive collection of toys and other geek memorabilia in an apartment he keeps solely for storing and displaying his bounty. He is, as you might guess, a big Star Wars fan.

Along with Brandon Alinger and Wade Lageose, Mandel has edited a massive, two-volume collection of McQuarrie’s Star Wars art. The exhaustive set provides a thought-provoking look at the way a single person can build public dreams. It’s especially fascinating to see prototype versions of things like C-3PO’s body (which initially resembled that of the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) and Vader’s helmet (which made him look like a Kurosawa samurai). We caught up with Mandel to talk about the experience of assembling the epic collection.

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