{"id":7817,"date":"2024-01-04T07:48:58","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T12:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/blog\/?p=7817"},"modified":"2024-01-04T07:48:58","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T12:48:58","slug":"2023-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/04\/2023-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"2023 in Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>2023 was a more productive year for me than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/blog\/2022-in-review\/\">2022<\/a>! I finished three times as many comics pages (or comics-page-equivalent artworks) as last year. Unfortunately, only one of those pages was for <i>Reluctant Oracle<\/i> #2:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_ReluctantOracle2preview.png\" alt=\"Another preview of Reluctant Oracle 2\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Instead, I drew a four-page comic for <a href=\"https:\/\/anmly.org\/ap36\/\">the Spring 2023 issue of <i>ANMLY<\/i><\/a> and a Riso print for the <i>2023 Kansas City Flatfile + Digitalfile<\/i> show at the H&#038;R Block Artspace. You can see the print in the middle of my Paper Plains Zine Fest 2 table in this photo: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_PPZF2-table.png\" alt=\"Will Cardini and Peter Hensel at Paper Plains Zine Fest 2 in Lawrence, KS\"><br \/>\nI&rsquo;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, <i>Suspense Stories of the Silent<\/i>, the first issue of which is below him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The second half of my year was spent drawing the cover and interstitial pages for <i>Cosmic Gossip<\/i>, a 20-page mini-comic collecting my three collaborative short comics with Mark Peters, which was published by <a href=\"https:\/\/badpublisherbooks.storenvy.com\/\">Bad Publisher Books<\/a> and debuted at Short Run in November. <\/p>\n<p>If you&rsquo;d like a signed copy, head over to <a href=\"https:\/\/hypercastle.bigcartel.com\/products\">my Big Cartel<\/a> to purchase one for $8! Here are a couple photos: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Cosmic-Gossip-Cover.png\" alt=\"Cosmic Gossip cover\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Cosmic-Gossip-Interior.png\" alt=\"Cosmic Gossip interior spread\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><i>Cosmic Gossip<\/i> got <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/comic-review-by-93781629\">a great review over on Ryan C.&rsquo;s <i>Four Color Apocalypse<\/i> Patreon<\/a>, where reviews of comics sent in by indie cartoonists and small-press publishers are always free. Here&rsquo;s an excerpt: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 &#8212; 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&#8217;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&#8217;t in the mood for more of that as the very notion of a shared consensus reality literally melts into oblivion all around us?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Over the past five years, I&rsquo;ve managed to put out a new mini-comic every other year. So hopefully I&rsquo;ll have <i>Relucant Oracle<\/i> #2 for y&rsquo;all in 2025! Before I can make that happen, however, I have a couple exciting projects underway for this year that I can&rsquo;t quite talk about yet&hellip; but I can share these sketchbook pages and in-process watercolor painting: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Sketchbook1.png\" alt=\"Sketches of the Miizzzard\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Sketchbook2.png\" alt=\"Sketches of melting Miizzzards\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Sketchbook3.png\" alt=\"Random sketches\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Watercolor1.png\" alt=\"Unfinished watercolor painting\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/images\/2024-01-04_Watercolor2.png\" alt=\"Unfinished watercolor painting\"><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recaps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}