I originally animated this wavy line pattern back in 2013; while revisiting some of my older GIFs for an upcoming project, I created a couple new variations to complete this sequence.
April 5th, 2024
January 4th, 2024
2023 in Review
2023 was a more productive year for me than 2022! I finished three times as many comics pages (or comics-page-equivalent artworks) as last year. Unfortunately, only one of those pages was for Reluctant Oracle #2:
Instead, I drew a four-page comic for the Spring 2023 issue of ANMLY and a Riso print for the 2023 Kansas City Flatfile + Digitalfile show at the H&R Block Artspace. You can see the print in the middle of my Paper Plains Zine Fest 2 table in this photo:
I’m on the left and my brother, Peter Hensel, is on the right. He runs the comic book empire Gotham Newsstand in San Antonio and publishes his own comic series, Suspense Stories of the Silent, the first issue of which is below him.
The second half of my year was spent drawing the cover and interstitial pages for Cosmic Gossip, a 20-page mini-comic collecting my three collaborative short comics with Mark Peters, which was published by Bad Publisher Books and debuted at Short Run in November.
If you’d like a signed copy, head over to my Big Cartel to purchase one for $8! Here are a couple photos:
Cosmic Gossip got a great review over on Ryan C.’s Four Color Apocalypse Patreon, where reviews of comics sent in by indie cartoonists and small-press publishers are always free. Here’s an excerpt:
Hell, a pretty solid argument could be made for this being the most conceptually ambitious of ALL Hyperverse releases (if only, ya know, it actually WERE one), since its scope takes in everything from the creation of the cosmos to the destruction of large swathes of it for sport to a coda on the meaning of it all — if any such philosophical bromide exists. Hint : according to the text of COSMIC GOSSIP (as well as to your own finely-honed skill for detecting bullshit) it doesn’t, but why let that spoil your good time? And, like all Cardini artistic endeavors, this latest one is a VERY good time, indeed. And who isn’t in the mood for more of that as the very notion of a shared consensus reality literally melts into oblivion all around us?
Over the past five years, I’ve managed to put out a new mini-comic every other year. So hopefully I’ll have Relucant Oracle #2 for y’all in 2025! Before I can make that happen, however, I have a couple exciting projects underway for this year that I can’t quite talk about yet… but I can share these sketchbook pages and in-process watercolor painting:
September 1st, 2023
Paper Plains Zine Fest 2
This Sunday I’ll be tabling at the second Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, KS!
I’ll have this new riso print for sale…
…plus my usual offerings.
Flyer by Lydia Halo.
This year, they’ve expanded PPZF to two days, and divided the programming and tabling onto separate days, which I love to see because tablers can attend without losing out on sales! The schedule on their website has the programming for Day 1, AKA tomorrow.
Sunday will be all tabling; I’ll be at Table 35, cozily sandwiched between my buddies Red Shorts Bindery and Jason Lips, plus a surprise special guest!! Click here to see a table map
June 1st, 2023
CAKE 2023
I’ll be tabling at CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, this weekend, their first show since 2019!
Excellent poster by David Alvarado.
CAKE is at a new location this year, the Broadway Armory. Come say hi at Table 509A along the back wall!
My spread will be similar to what I had at KC Zine Con and Paper Plains Zine Fest last year (this post includes a photo of my table from last year’s KCZC). Reluctant Oracle #1 came out in 2021 but it will be new to CAKE!
Unfortunately I’ll be missing this year’s KC Zine Con because it’s also this weekend.
May 5th, 2023
New Comic in ANMLY #36
I’m honored to let y’all know that I have a new short comic in the latest issue of Anomaly (stylized ANMLY), an online journal of literature and the arts.
ANMLY #36 cover by Dev Murphy.
Here’s the first page of my comic, entitled “Sunk Mind”:
January 20th, 2023
2022 in Review
2022 was a difficult year for me. Work stress and heartsickness over world events made it hard for me to muster up my creativity for comics; as a result, 2022 was one of my least productive years since I started keeping detailed records in 2019. However, I did get some artwork done.
In January, I finished two more pages of Reluctant Oracle #2, getting to a good stopping point before switching to paid work. Here’s one of those two pages:
I’m excited to get back to Reluctant Oracle #2 in the next month or two! That will be my main project until I get it done. I don’t want to leave anyone hanging for too long (*cough cough* Hyperbox *cough cough*).
Then in February I designed a logo for Moon Beast Games, an indie tabletop games company who are, in their own words, “devoted to the worship of the nameless creature that is just out of sight behind your right shoulder.”
As I mentioned in my 2021 recap (which I didn’t post until June 2022, lmao), Moon Beast had a successful Kickstarter last spring and have begun fulfillment. Be on the lookout for future Kickstarters from them that will include a couple illustrations I drew back in 2021!
In June and September, I tabled at two local shows: KC Zine Con #7 (in Kansas City, MO, natch) and the inaugural Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, KS. Here’s a photo of me with the latter’s mischievous mascot, Jammy the risograph:
These were my in-person first shows since 2019 and it was exciting to huff the rarified air of a zine fest! It felt great to be tabling and talking shop with fellow comics folk again.
Jumping back to August, Charles Stross’ Freyaverse series inspired me to write my first SF book review since 2018. Writing a review was a grind at first until I got my groove back. I’ve also done some work to try and save the older blog posts here from link rot and hotlinked images (sorry to anyone I did that to), although sadly there were a couple posts that even archive.org couldn’t save.
In November, my buddy Tim Brown took me and fellow cartoonist Thayer Bray to check out Chris Beneke’s comics library in Parsons, KS. Chris has a fascinating theory about how time works differently in comics, especially older newspaper strips; but of course I was drawn to newer stuff like this amazing Basil Wolverton cover:
The majority of my year, however, was spent designing characters for and drawing the third collab between me and writer Mark Peters:
You can read all eight pages of “Cosmic Planet-Eating Contest” here on my site. I had a blast drawing orb-crunching mayhem and working in a Kirby homage on the first panel. Even though I didn’t actually finish the detail work until this month, it was mostly done by the end of 2022.
September 2nd, 2022
Paper Plains Zine Fest
Hey y’all, I’ll be tabling at the inaugural Paper Plains Zine Fest this Saturday in Lawrence, KS!
Flyer by Lydia Halo.
Entry is free. Come say hi at Table 48! There’ll be tables inside and outside; I’ll be inside, where masks are required.
This is my second zine fest of the year (scream emoji), so I’ll have a similar setup to what I had at KC Zine Con #7, here’s a shot of my table from that event:
I’ll have my comics, a couple riso prints, and a few books from Retrofit. See ya there!
August 4th, 2022
Post-Human Scams and Spies
I’ve recently finished Charles Stross’ Freyaverse series: the novel Saturn’s Children (2008), the short story Bit Rot (2010), and the novel Neptune’s Brood (2013). The books had been on my to-read pile for a while because I’ve enjoyed his other space operas, especially Glasshouse.
This cover for the UK edition was painted by Fred Gambino.
The premise of Saturn’s Children is fantastic. It’s set in a future where humanity has created colonies across the solar system, but has since died out, leaving our artificially intelligent robotic creations to carry on a post-human civilization without us. One important conceptual detail is that even though these are manufactured beings, their brains are basically the same as ours: human engineers couldn’t figure out how to create general artificial intelligence from scratch, so they built artificial emulations of human brains.
One could imagine a sort of Bechdel Test for SF books about robots: do two artificial intelligences talk to each other about something other than humans? These books would easily pass, although they’re still ultimately about humans: our foibles and narcissisms are on center stage.
June 9th, 2022
KC Zine Con #7
I’m excited to tell y’all I’ll be tabling at KC Zine Con #7 this Saturday! It was the last con I tabled at in-person before the pandemic began, so it’s fitting that it’ll be my return to in-person tabling.
Poster by local tattoo artist Ana Mal.
I’ll be at table 19 in between John Coats, Thayer NG Bray, and Joe Trotter.
There was a virtual KC Zine Con #6 in Fall 2020 in which I participated, but unfortunately nothing beats cramming a bunch of grubby zinesters and zine enthusiasts into the same physical space. I dream about alternatives to the con model of zine and art comics distribution in North America but I do enjoy hanging out with like-minded people IRL and sharing our passion for cheaper art produced by individual, or small groups of, visionaries. Fortunately the KC Zine Con organizers are taking the health of tablers and attendees seriously by requiring masks for everyone and proof-of-vaccination for tablers.
This is what I look like wearing a mask.
This year I’ll have my newest mini-comic, Reluctant Oracle #1, in addition to my 2019 mini-comic Urscape #1, my 2017 collection of short comics Tales from the Hyperverse, my 2014 graphic novel Vortex, and a selection of Retrofit Comics.
June 3rd, 2022
2021 in Review
We’re almost halfway through 2022, but it’s not too late to tell y’all about what I was up to in 2021!
In July, I self-published the first installment of my latest graphic novel, Reluctant Oracle #1.
It dropped on the Strangers Fanzine distro, which was one of my most successful releases, and now it’s available via my Hypercastle Big Cartel. I’ve also moved all my other in-print comics there.
Reluctant Oracle #1 got a couple positive reviews on Ryan C.’s Four Color Apocalypse and Optical Sloth.
Later that same month, I had some pixel and paper artworks in the 2021 Kansas City H&R Block Artspace Flatfile + Digitalfile show.
Here’s a GIF of the Miizzzard loading:
Here’s an ink drawing, “Meeting of the Miizzz Minds”:
For the rest of my year, I worked on some illustrations for an indie tabletop game company, and I started Reluctant Oracle #2. The game company is Moon Beast Games; I’ll have more to say about them in my 2022 recap, and when they launch the Kickstarter for a tabletop campaign that includes my illustrations. Here’s a Reluctant Oracle #2 page I finished in December 2021 that I’m particularly proud of: