Back in the early-90s day, I wrote and drew a comics miniseries—Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels—that I decided should take place inside a cylindrical space habitat as famously envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.* However, I was unable to dig up a copy of the book at the time, and thus, in those benighted days long before the term “Google image search” existed, had no easy access to direct reference material.
So, I ended up basing my version of an O’Neill habitat on several very impressive and quite beautiful images drawn by wildly talented artist Ikuto Yamashita** for a Gundam piece in the short-lived Japanese magazine Machine Head. The funny part: I had no idea that Yamashita had in turn based his interpretation on paintings from The High Frontier, as he had managed to dig up better reference than yours truly. Many years later, I was startled to see the original paintings by Don Davis and others online (as seen above)… “Holy crap, that’s the source of that one double-page spread! Sweet!”
*More info on The High Frontier here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
**At the time, best known for his manga Dark Whisper; nowadays, better known as a Gainax mecha designer on Evangelion and many other projects.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 