Doctor Who celebrates its 60th anniversary next month. I collected some quotes from the Doctor in a zine…with random hipster photos. 🤭 Saturated colors, vintage objects, and a soft tone—this style of photo was all over the internet in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Here are photos of some of the pages.
Here’s an illustration of Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand from Arrested Development.
I started with a pencil sketch to draw the outline of each building.
You can see my other Posca pen illustrations under the “Posca” tag.
The new season of Superman & Lois hasn’t started yet, and I’ve been missing Superman stories. To fill the gap, I’ve been watching Superman: The Animated Series and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I’ve seen both shows before, but what I notice now is how often Superman deals with smaller problems. It’s not super villains and the end of the world every episode. I’m enjoying that smaller scale.
The antagonist is an angry business partner. Or a public figure who’s lying about their investments. The episode plots feel more focused and more grounded. Lex Luthor is in both shows, but even his schemes feel more grounded.
Superman gets involved in the plots because Lois and Clark are investigating. Not because he’s the only one who can help.
Both of those shows aired in the 1990s, before superheroes were mainstream on TV and in movies. Maybe all the superhero media in the past 20 years has upped the stakes over and over. And that’s why it’s doomsday stories all the time in newer media.
Superman & Lois has its lighter moments, but for the most part, it’s drama, action, and saving the world. They deal with one antagonist all season. Parts of seasons 1 and 2 felt exhausting to me because of that.
I love watching Clark and Lois in everyday life. I love their journalist sides. I’d love for season 3 to have smaller stories that connect to a bigger arc over the course of the season.
But it’s difficult to find that balance. The Flash struggles with the same issue–so much focus on the main antagonist that there isn’t much room for lighter, smaller stories.
I don’t watch a whole lot of current TV shows, so I don’t know if this is a trend in other genres. Are other shows hyper-focused on one antagonist? Do they balance smaller stories with larger arcs?
I watched the Saved by the Bell reboot on Peacock, and now I’m re-watching the original Saved by the Bell series (which is also on Peacock) because…why not?
The show doesn’t really play with fantasy elements (unless daydreaming and cartoony video effects count), but I realized it easily could have had a fantasy twist: Zack Morris is a trickster god.
Over the course of lying to fellow students and taking advantage of his friends, Zack hurts people’s feelings. His scams usually fail, but he tries again anyway in the next episode. Why would he keep doing this?
He says, “Time out!” and everyone freezes. Zack laughs when he waves his hand in front of people’s faces and they don’t react. He can even move things around in the scene or position himself for an easy escape. People stay frozen until Zack says, “Time in!”, and then time moves again. How is he able to do this?
If Zack is addressing the audience, does that mean he’s aware he’s on a TV show? And if so, why does he keep up the illusion with his friends, instead of telling them the truth?
Zack is a trickster god who found a way into a parallel universe (what is Saved by the Bell to us).
He runs scams as a way to get what he wants–that’s built into his nature–and he doesn’t care about hurting humans.
He can stop and start time, and no one else seems to have this ability.
He can talk to us because he’s aware of parallel universes, since he crossed from his universe into Saved by the Bell.
Zack keeps up the illusion with his friends, because if he tells them the truth, he’ll be banished back to his universe forever.
I started watching Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix. It’s a documentary series where each episode focuses on one designer and a different kind of design.
One episode is about Neri Oxman, a professor at MIT Media Lab. She leads a research team in exploring materials informed by nature. (Think: a strong plastic-like material made from proteins found in milk.)
In the episode, she talks about the relationship between art, science, engineering, and design. Usually, we think of them as four separate areas. You work in one domain but not the others. But Neri says, what if, instead, we thought of them as a circle? As a clock, where we shift from one discipline to another over time. Input from one domain becomes the output of another.
Neri uses architecture, design, engineering, and biology in her work, so it makes sense that she talks about interdisciplinary work.
A diagram displays on the screen at this point of the episode, and I paused it to draw it myself. When I see a diagram that clicks for me, I love recreating it as my way of learning.
Here’s the circle, with the disciplines each having their own domain, but now connected.
I’m paraphrasing the explanation from the documentary:
Art is for expression. It looks at cultural behavior, which leads to questioning presumptions about the world. These questions lead into science.
Science is for exploration. We gain information (input from art) and turn it into knowledge (output to engineering).
Engineering is for invention. It takes knowledge and turns it into utility for design.
Design is for communication. We take utility, give it context, and turn it into cultural behavior (which is then expressed as art).
Full circle.
Continuing with the clock analogy, Neri says that at the midnight position, that’s where art meets science, where Picasso meets Einstein.
I love this model because it shows the value of these disciplines working together. Rather than limit work to one domain, you can shift through domains (with a team…no one is an expert in all four areas) to create a full understanding, exploration, use, and expression.