Storm troopers mow the lawn, Jesus rides a Segway, Ceiling Cat lurks in the sky and the Stay-Puft marshmallow man gazes out over a nonchalant 19th century crowd in dusty, unwanted thrift store paintings altered by David Irvine. The Toronto-based artist inserts characters from contemporary pop culture into unexpected settings, like bucolic rural pastures and traditional religious imagery.

Irvine picks through yard sales, secondhand stores and sidewalk piles destined for the landfill to find rejected paintings to alter, rescuing them from obscurity and placing them in the hands of collectors all over the world. According to his website, “David will never paint over the existing signature and depending on the project will adapt the traits of the original (coloring, lighting, brushstrokes etc.) or will go in a complete opposite direction and achieve a high contrast in imagery.”

Characters from Star Wars and comic books are some of Irvine’s favorite subjects, with Darth Vader enjoying a relaxing afternoon fishing on the lake and Jabba the Hut getting his portrait painted. In a painting entitled ‘Not the Gardener,’ Leatherface raises his bloody chainsaw in a rose garden. An otherwise unremarkable painting of a dirt road becomes the backdrop for a 1970s car chase.

The pieces have become so popular, he can’t keep them stocked in his Etsy shop, but if you want your very own romantic beach scene of Batman and Wonder Woman or Spock appearing to an angel on an oversized donut, you can keep tabs on Irvine’s work at his Facebook page. Prints are also available at Society6.

A cluster of organic shapes that look almost biological in nature, these bold white volumes will soon be the home of a new Comic and Animation Museum in Hangzhou, China. Dutch design firm MVRDV won a competition to design the museum with this unusual approach, featuring a spiraling interior that highlights decades of cartoon history.

The rounded shapes of the structure, which reach down to the ground on tapered ‘legs’, are no accident: they were designed to resemble the speech bubbles that are so familiar to comic book fans. Each ‘bubble’ in the design will house a different function of the museum, including two exhibition spaces that will project animations onto the curved interior wall.

Visitors will meander through a high-ceilinged space on raised platforms and walkways, gazing up at massive replicas of comic book characters and other oversized displays and then spiraling up along the walls into a comic book library, open to the main chamber. Where ‘bubbles’ connect, internal openings are created, which not only provide a means to get from one area to another, but also a look into the adjoining space.

The museum will feature a cinema and a roof terrace restaurant. The complex will also include a series of parks on islands in White Horse Lake with a public plaza and an expo center which will house the annual China International Comic and Animation Festival. Construction on the Comic and Animation Museum will begin in 2012.