George Lucas's First Art Purchase Was a Comic-Strip Caveman

As a college student, years before he had written a word of Star Wars, George Lucas bought a drawing of a caveman. It was the first artwork he ever bought, and it started a habit that has now filled a museum.

A Caveman From the Funny Pages

The caveman was Alley Oop. The museum describes its founder's first purchase as "an illustration of Alley Oop, the time-traveling caveman".

Alley Oop had been running in American newspapers since December 1932, drawn by V. T. Hamlin. Its first small syndicate folded within months, and the Newspaper Enterprise Association picked the strip up in 1933 and carried it across the country. The character carried a stone axe, rode a pet dinosaur called Dinny and, in later storylines, traveled through history by machine.

That kind of drawing was not what museums collected. As the Lucas Museum puts it, illustration, comics and graphic stories "have not always received the respect they deserve".

Fifty Years of Buying

Lucas never stopped. He founded the museum with his wife, Mellody Hobson, and over roughly fifty years the collection the two of them built has grown to more than 40,000 works.

It runs from illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth to comic artists including Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta and Robert Crumb.

It also holds Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Robert Colescott and the muralists Judith F. Baca and Diego Rivera.

Alongside the art sit the complete Lucas Archives, the original Lucasfilm materials from 1971 to 2012 that Lucas kept after selling the company.

The One Rule

None of it is for trading.

"I could never sell my art," Lucas says. "It just is not what I think art is. I think it's more about an emotional connection with the work, not how much it cost."

What Opens on September 22

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on September 22, 2026, at One Lucas Plaza in Exposition Park, South Los Angeles.

The building is a curving, spaceship-like design by Ma Yansong of MAD, set in new green space by Mia Lehrer and her team at Studio-MLA.

The opening exhibitions hold more than 1,200 objects across more than 30 galleries and roughly 100,000 square feet of space, from ancient sculptures of gods and goddesses to Renaissance paintings, photographs, comics and cinema.

Whole rooms are given over to everyday life: childhood, community, family, love, motherhood, play, school, sports and work. Others belong to Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Frazetta, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, manga and murals.

The Neighbors Get In First

People who live in the museum's own 90037 zip code can get in free with an LM37 pass, which covers the holder plus one guest.

Local residents, business owners and civic leaders were also invited to a community preview day on September 13, ahead of the public opening.

"From the very beginning, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson envisioned a museum where everyone feels welcome and sees it as their own," said Tracey Bates, the museum's CEO.