After almost two decades, cartoonist and The Nib founder Matt Bors has announced he’s retiring from his weekly political comic. His comic on background checks that ran at the end of March will be his last regular political cartoon.
He plans to continue running The Nib, the award-winning webcomics site that features political and nonfiction comics on a daily basis by a variety of artists. He also said he plans to do more nonfiction comics, including comic interviews, for the site. And he’s preparing pitches for fiction comics as well.
“So I will be staying busy, as always,” he said in his announcement post. “Something had to give in my life to make room for other things and, frankly, it was an easy decision. I’ve drawn political cartoons every week since I was 19 and feel like I have said everything I can say, often a few times over. I know this may be disappointing to longtime readers, but my creative desires pull me in another direction, one where I hope to create more work on par with what I’ve done in this field. I also owe it to both The Nib’s readers and creators to keep the publication going as long as possible.”
Bors has been creating editorial cartoons since college, and at 23, he became the youngest cartoonist syndicated by Universal Features in the U.S. at the time. His comics have appeared in the L.A. Times, The Nation, Village Voice, The Guardian and many other publications, and his work has been collected in books like War is Boring and Life Begins at Incorporation. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in both 2012 and 2020. He founded The Nib in 2013
“I doubt I will miss having a weekly deadline, but I know I’ll miss political cartooning in many ways—wrestling with political issues, connecting with readers, whiling away my time at the drawing table,” he said. “Now I’m going to find ways to do all of those things in a different way.”