The End of The Nib

After ten years, the comics publication I founded shuts down this Friday.

Not bad.

This week is the final week of The Nib. After ten years of publication, thousands of comics, and fifteen issues of the magazine, we are shutting down. I am choosing to give it a death with dignity rather than make painful cuts and have it operate as a shadow of itself for a few more years. We have a blowout last day coming this Friday, with about four times as many comics as we usually run.

Then it will end ten years—almost to the exact day—since I first launched The Nib on Medium in 2013 as a new home for political cartoons and nonfiction comics.

I began writing something for this newsletter reflecting on the last ten years, but it quickly became about being part of the new media bubble of the 2010s—a well-funded era of tech and news sites spurred by the explosion of smart phones and social media that I’m realizing defined the era of The Nib.

As social media morphs into something even worse than it was—as Buzzfeed News, Gawker, Vice, and the rest of the gang all close down and liquidate—that era feels definitively over. I plan to write something about my time in that world, but it didn’t feel right for this moment, which judging from reader reactions has become more of a celebration of what we accomplished than a trip through the aggravating world of start-ups, Twitter, and media pivots.

So I just want to take some space to acknowledge some people I have worked with over the years. The Nib was a lot of things, but probably the most unique thing about it was being a publication run entirely by cartoonists.

When I first started The Nib, I did all the work on my own, but that didn’t last long. The firehose of comics I was publishing, and the success they were having, warranted some help. The first to join me was Eleri Harris, a journalist and cartoonist graduating from The Center for Cartoon Studies with an eye on nonfiction. Eleri edited a lot of our longer journalistic comics and formed many internal processes that allowed us to function as a publication. The volume of nonfiction comics we were able to put out is a result of her work and dedication to fellow cartoonists.

Eleri worked on a lot of comics of her own at The Nib, notably a huge true crime comic that remains the longest work we ever published and which won her a Ledger Award in Australia. Her final comic went up Monday and is on deforestation and climate change. She also became a close co-worker, sharing an office with me in Portland, and in those days we really felt like a publication. We even had (paid) interns at times! When Covid hit, it shut down our office and we both ended up in different countries, and though we continued working together I haven’t seen her in person since. Though we’ll meet again in a little over a week at SPX.

Next to join was Mattie Lubchansky, one of the funniest cartoonists I’d come across in a while, whose sensibilities around political cartoons seemed aligned with my own. In addition to doing weekly comics for the better part of ten years, Mattie ran our social media and handled our website posts and newsletter—through rain or shine or cartoonist filing late or some last minute change demanded from the imperious editor. If you opened up the Nib newsletter every morning, as many thousands did, you have Mattie to thank.

Mattie and I worked on what became a popular aesthetic at The Nib—wasteland comics—and we served as each other’s editors, bouncing ideas back and forth for years through Slack and countless video chats from opposite ends of the country. When we worked on Nib animations, Lubchansky and I were the head writers in addition to producers and I think we had the time of our lives writing scripts for ourselves and others to draw, some set in the wasteland and some not, and that time of collaboration will remain one of the creative high points of my career. They have a new book out, they’re working on another one, and are on a trajectory where I’ll be lucky to get to work with them again.

Andy Warner was probably the most prolific nonfiction contributor we had. Andy was simply an idea factory and probably had a comic in some stage of development for most of The Nib’s existence. Eventually, I couldn’t publish as much as I used to and Andy drifted more into graphic novels, where his whole deal as a guy with interest and knowledge of a hundred different topics is holding up well. He also was very into international comics, particularly from the Middle East, and the not-insignificant amount of work we ran from contributors in that part of the world is largely due to his advocacy and effort.

Sarah Shay Mirk I knew from way back in Portland. I had moved there in the mid-aughts and Mirk was working for the local alt weekly paper, the Portland Mercury. We’d run into each other at media and comics events, the Occupy movement (remember that?) and collaborated on a piece for an all-comics journalism outlet that preceded mine called Symbolia. After The Nib relaunched and expanded a second time in 2016, Mirk, who was already a contributor, was an obvious option for the unique kind of cartoonist editor position I could occasionally offer people for a few years before we’d be laid off.

Mirk wore many hats and wore them well—they interviewed, edited, wrote, assigned stories, copy edited, worked on our two animation seasons, and drew their own comics among countless other things I’m likely forgetting.

Whit Taylor had started contributing early enough to make it into Eat More Comics, our best-of collection capturing the 2013-2015 iteration of The Nib. She would officially become an editor in the third era of The Nib—the less well-financed indie version of the last few years under which the bulk of our magazines were produced. Whit was more than qualified and was editing, writing, drawing everything from humor to explainers, and helping to shape the magazine coverage by, among other things, bringing a focus on public health to her work. If you want a dark little chuckle check out her 2018 comic “America Isn’t Ready For a Pandemic.”

Like everyone I’m mentioning here, Whit is editing, writing, and drawing various comics and graphic novels and seems bound for plenty of success beyond The Nib so, while it is saddening to break up the band, it really seems like everyone is doing quite fine and even far better than when I started working with them.

If you knew me in the 2010s, you’d know I was a print magazine nut and kept moving The Nib toward my not-so-secret end goal of launching a magazine. For that, I’d need an excellent designer with not just a mind for comics, but who was a cartoonist, and I knew just the guy. Mark Kaufman flew up to Portland for a grand idea session with me and my giant collection of nice magazines to figure out how to make this obsession of mine a real thing. And it was a damn fine thing he helped make.

Mark’s fingerprints are all over The Nib. His hand lettering became the house font for the publication, he worked on illustrations, designed ads, drew stickers, and created his own comics as a contributor. Oh, one time Jack Chick died (lol) and we did this parody tract that Mark illustrated on the fly.

That was the kind of thing you could pull off at a moment’s notice working with these people. You could get a magazine out, run a daily publication, send cartoonists places to do journalism, and get thousands of comics out in the world. I never expected it to last forever, or as long as it did.

Now there’s the temptation to do some kind of “best of The Nib” list and link back to all the major comics we ran, go through the major high points, tout the notable pieces. But I’ll inevitably leave things out, fail to mention some of our many important contributors, and, truthfully, there’s so much we published I don’t even know where to begin. If you were there reading us through the years, then you know, and if you supported us—thank you. You quite literally made it all possible.

Last call for magazines

Through the end of the week, you can download PDFs of all fifteen issues of The Nib magazine for free. My gift to you! Though if you grab them and haven’t given us any money before, consider throwing in a few bucks for longterm web preservation.

Most of The Nib magazines are still available in print. This week they are on clearance—anywhere from $5 to $10 each. I’m proud of them all, but don’t miss our final issue, the Future issue, which I think is one of our strongest and most relevant efforts.

Upcoming conventions

The show goes on, apparently. I will be tabling with Nib magazines and my own books at five comic shows through the end of the year. The first will be at SPX in Bethesda on September 9-10 , followed by the Guelph Comics Jam on September 16 (in my new home of Ontario), and finally CXC in Columbus, Ohio, at the end of the month. The latter will feature an after party dedicated to The Nib—more info soon.

Then, I’m set to appear at the Nonfiction Comics Festival in Burlington, Vermont, on November 18, as well as LA Comic Con in early December. If you are in any of these cities attending any of these cons, please stop by and say hi! Particularly stop by if you don’t have all the issues of the magazine, because I’d like to sell them.

Well, that’s it for now

Time to wrap up my publication and turn 40 in two weeks. Certainly nothing to worry about! I’m fine!

I have ideas for what I’ll do next but it will take some time before I have anything to show. Next week I’ll wake up for the first time in twenty years without a daily or weekly deadline, sit down at my desk, and start work on more comics.