This weekend I’ll be in Minneapolis for the first time to table at my first Autoptic Festival!
My table at Kansas City Zine Con #9.
At Table 16A, I’ll have my recent comics, which you can see in the above photo from my last tabling event, including the final stack of the first print run of Reluctant Oracle #1. I’ll also have some fun Xerox comics I made for a comics workshop I taught at my kid’s summer camp.
Hey y’all!! I had to miss KC Zine Con #8 last June because it was the same weekend as CAKE, but I’ll be back for KC Zine Con #9 this weekend!
I couldn’t find a poster for this year’s show, so I just grabbed this screenshot of their cool website, designed and developed by catmothcrow.
Last year, KCZC moved to Goofball Sk8boards, which is right in my neighb, and fortunately for me, they’ll be there again this year. To make room for more exhibitors and enable zinesters to do some shopping and attend panels, they’re splitting us up, so some people are tabling on Saturday, and some people are tabling on Sunday.
I’ll be there Saturday, June 22nd, from 11am to 5pm at Table 2, next to my bud Nick Francis Potter and right by the northeast entrance:
I’m bringing my comics and prints, including my latest comic containing my collabs with Mark Peters, Cosmic Gossip! Because I just have a half table, I’m not bringing any Retrofit comics.
Thanks to everyone who came to the opening for Read the Room two weeks ago, we had a blast!!
Me laughing in front of my mural, Blursed Miizzzard. Photo by Kate Schroeder.
It was great to see so many of the artists at the opening. We took a group shot at the end but didn’t capture everyone who showed up:
Left to right: Josh Rios, Travis Millard, Thayer N G Bray, Tim Brown, me (Will Cardini), Siobhán Gallagher, John F. Malta, Momoko Usami, and Joshua W. Cotter. Photo by Kimi Kitada.
Big ups to all the artists for trusting us with their brilliant artworks; my co-curators for bearing with my hyper-focus on details; everyone at Charlotte Street, especially Kimi and Kevin who helped so much with install; and my fam for putting up with all the time I had to put into this project.
The show is up thru Saturday, July 13th, and we have a couple more events planned, both taking place in the Charlotte Street Kemper Library:
You can also just come by Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming Street Kansas City, MO 64111, Tuesday thru Friday 12 to 5pm and Saturday 11am to 5pm, to check the work out! Or see the install shots on my Instagram.
I’m excited to tell y’all about Read the Room, an art show I co-curated with Tim Brown, Thayer N G Bray, and Jason Lips that opens in a week and a half at Charlotte Street here in Kansas City! To explain what it’s about, here’s our curatorial statement:
Read the Room consists of more than 20 local and regional artists who work within or in dialogue with the worlds of alternative comics, zines, and cartooning.
The exhibition asks you to consider comics as an expansive and evolving mode of visual storytelling. Through the accessible language of comics, each artist authors their own understanding of the world as well as imagining new ones.
Read the Room invites you to spend time with these narrative works, appreciating them both as works of visual and literary art. Please, do read the room.
Artists include Kelsey Borch, Joshua W. Cotter, Momoko Usami, Nick Potter, Jenny Jo Hrabe, Jamie Bates, John F. Malta, Siobhán Gallagher, and Barbara Lane Tharsas. I’m grateful to my co-curators for opening my eyes to seeing comics in other media such as ceramics.
A preliminary postcard mockup. Clockwise from left, artworks are Untitled by Jenny Jo Hrabe, a crop of a page from 1000 Doors by Kelsey Borch, and Traversing Twilight by Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter.
The co-curators will also have works in the exhibition. I’ve created a big vinyl mural for it, here’s a sketch of what it’ll look like:
The opening will be 6 to 9pm on Friday, May 24th at Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO. I hope to see y’all there, but if you can’t make it to the opening, the show will remain up thru July 13th. Check out the post about Read the Room on the Charlotte Street Foundation website for more details about the show and related events.
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:
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
