2024 was a huge year for me! I did two big murals and co-curated a comics-related art show.

The first mural was commissioned by my friends Grant Davis and Mike Moody for a wall in the reception area of their podcast recording studio RecordATX in 2023 and went up this past April (in my old haunt the ATX, natch). Check it out:

Photo by Grant Davis.

I hadn’t done much mural work, so I wasn’t sure about the best approach and printing method. But when Grant suggested Wall Decal World, whom he’d worked with before, and I showed their website to my wife Glade, she had the brilliant idea to do a die-cut mural where the negative space is the wall. I was so pleased with this concept and how it turned out that I went back to Wall Decal World to print a mural for my main contribution to Read the Room, the art show I co-curated for Charlotte Street Foundation that opened at the end of May.

Here are some install shots of the show:

Photo by EG Schempf. Artist credits from left to right and back to front:

On the freestanding wall:
John F. Malta, Rotten Metropolis Comic Pages and John Buice, Untitled Collection.

On the right wall: Tim Brown, More Kisses; eight pages of original art by Vincent Carton Mollica; Mary Climes, excerpt from Vig (original artwork) and The Magic Mountain (on the monitor); and part of Joshua W. Cotter’s installation, Infinite ©uck & Related Social Media Pieces.

Shining on the back pedestal: Jamies Bates, Mouthy Lamp.
Resting on the front pedestal: Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter, Traversing Twilight.

Photo by EG Schempf. Artist credits from left to right and top to bottom:

Six digital prints of art from Siobhán Gallagher’s book, Full of Myself: A Graphic Memoir About Body Image; Kelsey Borch, 1000 Doors (on the wall) and digital art reel (on the monitor); and on the pedestal, Barbara Lane Tharas, Sit With It.

Photo by EG Schempf. An unobstructed shot of my mural, Blursed Miizzzard.

Photo by EG Schempf. All three ceramic works by Momoko Usami.
Titled from left to right and top to bottom:

Witness #1, Lady Justice; Witness #2, Sea Change; and on the pedestal, Diversity Seed.

Co-curating the show, creating my own art for it, and assisting with the install were a lot of work from the end of 2023 till the opening, but it was a very rewarding experience to collaborate with my co-curators Thayer N G Bray, Tim Brown, and Jason Lips; all the artists who contributed; and everyone at Charlotte Street. Our show got a nice online review in a local mag, KC Studio, that highlighted the “monumental” “meta-effect” of seeing Joshua Cotter’s 110 intricate original pencil comic pages arranged on the wall in a grid, with a stack of free newsprint editions of the comic under it. So glad we got to realize Joshua’s vision!

Photo by EG Schempf. Joshua W. Cotter, Infinite ©uck & Related Social Media Pieces.

All the above photos were just from the the biggest room in the show! I could fill this whole post with show photos, but that’s all I’m going to share for now. I posted more on my Instagram this past summer.

In the second half of the year, I tabled at KC Zine Con for the I-can’t-remember-how-many-th time, and Autoptic for the first time.

KCZC was in a new-to-me venue, Goofball Sk8boards, which was delightful because it’s right in my neighb. The organizers split the tablers over two days, so I tabled next to Nick Francis Potter, a Read the Room participant and excellent artist, on Saturday, and got to chat with a couple other equally amazing participants, Jenny Jo Hrabe and Barbara Lane Tharas, on Sunday. I enjoyed being able to both table and visit the show as an attendee, but I felt like the split roster might’ve lowered sales, especially for zinesters who only tabled on Sunday.

Autoptic was a blast because I was reuntied with my co-curator and co-tabler Tim Brown after he moved from KC to Minneapolis and I finally got to meet Ryan Carey in person after pestering him with review copies of my Hyperverse comics for years! Unfortunately I didn’t realize Insert Name Zine Fest was the next day, but hopefully I can pull off the double-comics-fest weekend next time the stars align.

At the end of the year I got back to drawing. I submitted to the Crossroads Artboards again but wasn’t chosen, so I’m gonna end this post with my third, unrealized mural design for the year:

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: