The Nib will shut down after August

The Nib, the award-winning, critically acclaimed and much-needed political comics website and publisher, will shut down at the end of the summer.

Editor and publisher Matt Bors announced the decision on the site, noting the decision was “incredibly hard,” but “the math isn’t working anymore.”

“This was an incredibly hard decision to make and there’s no one factor involved,” Bors said. “Rather it involves, well, everything. The rising costs of paper and postage, the changing landscape of social media, subscription exhaustion, inflation, and the simple difficulty of keeping a small independent publishing project alive with relatively few resources—though we did a lot with them. The math isn’t working anymore.”

The Nib will continue through the summer, as Bors said they plan to finish out August with regular daily postings. They will also publish a final issue of their print magazine, The Future issue, which will feature comics about Luddites, extinction, space colonies, Afro-futurism and more.

“I’m really proud of what we have accomplished,” Bors continued. “Over the past decade, The Nib has published more than 6,000 comics and paid out more than $2 million to creators. Countless book projects have launched from Nib pieces and a number of creators had their first professional comics published with us. For 10 years we were the outlet supporting political cartooning and showcasing the possibilities of nonfiction comics. Rather than enduring years of painful cuts and diminishing output, I’d rather go out while The Nib is still in a place that feels respectable, rather than run the publication into the ground.”

Bors added that it’s likely The Nib could come back together for an anthology or other special projects in the future.

The Nib kicked off in 2013 on Medium, but after platform changes on that site, Bors took the site to First Look Media, which hosted it through June of 2019. After losing their support from First Look, The Nib went independent, relying on membership fees and merch sales to fund the site and pay cartoonists. Over the years the site has published comics by Jen Sorensen, Mike Dawson, Tom Tomorrow, Pia Guerra, Nate Powell, Ruben Bolling, Pat Oliphant and countless others, including Bors. They’ve been nominated for and won several industry awards, from the Eisner to the Ringo to the Ignatz to the The Cartoonist Studio Prize, and many more.