Vince Gilligan had no idea. Working within his bubble, the creator of "Breaking Bad" and spinoff "Better Call Saul" was not attuned to how his television work was inspiring other artists. At least until right under his nose, the bulletin boards began filling up.

"I am not someone who ever looks up myself or my work on the internet," Gilligan says from his Los Angeles production office. "It's not that I'm without ego — it's just that I suspect it would send me down some rabbit hole that I'd never recover from."

To work on AMC's cable-ratings juggernaut "Better Call Saul," Gilligan's team moved into offices with aesthetics far from those of a rabbit hole. They were open and sterile and free of any funky spirit. That simply wouldn't do. So some show employees began filling the massive mounted whiteboards with work they downloaded from around the world: thousands of pieces of fan art inspired by Gilligan's New Mexican desert universe of people baking in moral decay.

"We printed out every image we could find from Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram," says "Better Call Saul" producer Jenn Carroll. Images of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, the corrupt defense attorney portrayed by Bob Odenkirk. And of Mike Ehrmantraut, the retired, cartel-affiliated cop played by Jonathan Banks. The goal: "To inspire the writers and surround them with the excitement around these characters."

As the art collection spread throughout the office, Gilligan would stop in the hallway daily and stare with awe until finally, two years ago, he began asking his team: "How do we share this? How do we curate this — the very best broadest cross-section of this?"

The answer arrived earlier this month in the form of a hardcover collection titled "99.1% Pure: Breaking Bad Art," an eclectic 232-page trip into the smash series that persists in pop culture nearly a decade after it went off the air. These pages trace the visual arc of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the cancer-stricken chem teacher turned meth-artist kingpin, and Albuquerque partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), along with their circle of the once-good, the bad and the bloodied.

The featured artworks are not mere representation; they are thoughtful interpretation. Amid all the signature goatees and glasses and porkpie hats, they explore emotion and motivation. Amid the lab gear, what is the chemistry of and between characters? As the book authors Claudia Azurmendi and Joanna Zhang write of White: "It is an open question as to whether he is a good guy making a series of progressively immoral decisions or a bad guy whose true nature is revealed over time."

So we see and hear from scores of artists who wrestle with this descent as rendered in pixel and paint, colored pencil and even Pez dispensers. Of Walt's trajectory toward becoming the darkly domineering figure known as Heisenberg, Spanish artist Victor Moral says in the book: "There's no good choice, no good end. Bitter as life."

Gilligan relished all these insights from creators as far away as Australia and South America — many of their takes as deftly textured as the wax and clay character busts shaped by Florida sculptor Rocco Tartamella.

"People always ask: 'What does this mean, what does that mean?' And I always try to come up with a formal answer — usually a very long-winded one," Gilligan says of his AMC shows, the current one co-created with Peter Gould. But then Gilligan realized: The people who create a TV show "are seldom the best people to ask to explain what that thing is." The more often people asked him why and how events unfolded in "Breaking Bad," the more he realized: "I couldn't see the forest for the trees."

So when he reads interpretations from selected artists, "I learn things about my own TV show that I didn't know," says Gilligan, who curated the book art with Carroll, Clementine Dunnell and Melissa Ng. He adds: "You can't help but be flattered as hell."

Not that Gilligan comes to the project's curation as a neophyte of canvas and clay. As he notes in the book's introduction, he grew up in Farmville, Va., in the 1970s and early '80s with dreams of becoming a visual artist. He was inspired by his mother, as well as an art teacher whose son, Angus Wall, would become an Oscar-winning film editor for David Fincher.

"I thought I was going to draw and paint and sculpt for a living," Gilligan says. "I love movies, too, and I thought I was going to end up doing special effects for movies and use what skills I have as a visual artist to create space ships and robots and monsters."

But then he encountered a "bigger pond" in his high school years, when he was briefly enrolled at Interlochen, an arts academy in Michigan. "I was surrounded by young people my age who were more talented than I was."

Things worked out, he says. He realized his truest gift was as a storyteller. And he embraces working in a collaborative environment for his Hollywood projects, teaming with artists and craftspeople who are the best at what they do.

And he remains humbled by the array of artistry spawned by his screen work. "Do I covet their mastery? Does it stir in me a long-dormant envy dating back to my teenage years?" he writes in the intro. "Yeah, a little bit. But that's OK. For me, these works are a special gift."

Curating the book meant leaving hundreds of valued artworks on the cutting-room floor. Could this project lead to a sequel of "Better Call Saul" fan art?

Gilligan laughs warmly. "From your mouth to God's ears."