Check Out These Rarely Seen 'Empire Strikes Back' Illustrations Featured on Vintage Topps Cards

To follow up the huge success of its 1977 Star Wars trading-card sets, Topps was back in full force when The Empire Strikes Back arrived three years later. In addition to the typical film-scene photos, Topps also released Star Wars Galaxy, a series featuring original artwork related to the film “experience” that the company commissioned. “Before that time, self-created art for our Star Wars sets was pretty rare,” says Gary Gerani, the man who has edited all the Star Wars card lines, from 1977 to the ones for the recently released The Force Awakens. He also edited Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume Two (available Tuesday), which features the entire run of cards tied to Episode V.

Most of the imagery in the book will be instantly recognizable to fans of Empire, but there is also a collection of Lucasfilm drawings that has not been widely disseminated since the film played in theaters. Here, we’ve collected a selection of those illustrations, featuring the film’s heroes and villains in action poses that could have been ripped from the comics.

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All images courtesy of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume Two, by the Topps Company and Gary Gerani © Abrams ComicArts, 2016.