“What I wanted to achieve with my piece was take the real-life rhinoceros and have it almost interrupting the comic book villain and ensuring the viewer doesn’t forget where he came from.” – Patrick Galvin

How are we Celebrating National #ScienceWeek2025?
With a 🦏Publication drop!🦏

“Science Goes Pop: The Zine Art Edition” – a project developed with Crystal-Leigh Clitheroe for our w/k series on “Visual Science Storytelling, Sequential Art & Illustrated Science Communication” (https://between-science-and-art.com/tag/illustrated-scicomm/)!

When Canberra artists @hollowbonesco (Patrick Galvin) and @cspo_shoots (Camilo Potocnjak Oxman, PhD) [you can find them on Insta!] met scholars Stefan Buchenberger and Torsten Weber, magic happened ✨

🕷️ What’s inside:

Spider-Man villains meet real-life biology in “Real Life Rhino” – where comic book pseudo-science crashes into photographic reality
“Mukashi Mukashi Magazine” – a stunning exploration of Japanese manga as historical education, featuring gekiga-style art and cultural critique

🎭 The Art: Patrick’s “Real Life Rhino” literally breaks the fourth wall – while Camilo’s piece is “a celebration of the place that manga holds within Japanese history, the culture of the ‘shokunin’, and the influence that these objects have had on global aesthetic sensibilities.” – Oxman.

📚 This isn’t just art about science – it’s visual narratives that bridge academic research and public understanding. From Spider-Man’s radioactive origins to Japan’s historical manga tradition, these works reveal how pop culture shapes our relationship with science.

Read the full publication here:
https://between-science-and-art.com/science-goes-pop-the-zine-art-edition/

And discover how juxtaposition, cultural codes, and visual metaphors make complex ideas accessible to everyone!

With endless thanks to Houl @houlart, Smith’s Alternative @smiths_miscellaneous and Inspiring Australia ACT and, of course, w/k–Zwischen Wissenschaft & Kunst for making this possible!!!