Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back
Painted after Ralph McQuarrie
- 48 plates
- Ralph McQuarrie
The book
Donald F. Glut's 1980 novelisation. The rebels are found on Hoth and scattered; Luke goes to a swamp to be trained by someone who does not want to train him; the others run to a floating city and are betrayed by a friend who has run out of good options. It ends with a maiming, a revelation and no rescue.
Why Ralph McQuarrie
Empire is the episode McQuarrie shaped most and it shows in the source: the walkers, Bespin and the carbon-freeze chamber were his designs before they were anyone's.
It is also the entry in the trilogy that suits his temperament best. He paints the pause rather than the battle — the walkers still distant, the gantry before anyone falls — and Empire is a story that spends most of its length losing quietly.
What to look for
Bespin denies the ground. Seven plates state it explicitly: a city in cloud has no floor beneath it, and one horizon line at the bottom of the frame turns it back into a building on a hill. Hoth's plains use the empty style — no structure invented to fill the emptiness, because the emptiness is the subject.
