Earlier today, editor-in-chief Matt Bors announced that The Nib, the left-wing editorial comics publication he founded in 2013, will be ceasing regular operations at the end of August. From Bors's post:

This was an incredibly hard decision to make and there’s no one factor involved. 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.

I’m really proud of what we have accomplished. 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 ten 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.

In one regard, this is obviously very sad. I've personally been subscribed to The Nib for its entire lifetime to date, and I've got the well-worn tote bag to prove it. Political publications with progressive mandates are uncommon, and ones that actually walk the walk while being as relatively successful as The Nib managed to be are basically unheard-of. A lot of very good editors and cartoonists have worked for/contributed to The Nib over the past decade, and it's heartbreaking to think of a solid, reliable employer for what is essentially an entire cohort of creative professionals ceasing to exist. I've never once heard of anyone having to chase The Nib's accounting department for a freelance payment, and I've never heard any of their contributors say anything negative about the editorial team. The Nib leaves behind an unrivalled body of short-form and long-form political cartoons - almost all of it collected in print - from a frankly astonishing range of voices and perspectives. It is not hyperbole to say that we will never see a publication like The Nib again.

That said...

Despite all of what I said in that previous paragraph being true, it does kind of feel like a good time for The Nib to close its doors. It's been clear for a while that the full-time editorial team's focus has been drifting somewhat - Bors recently released the collected first six issues of his satirical Justice Warriors, and Mattie Lubchansky is making a return to longform comicking with their upcoming graphic novel Boys Weekend. There's also been a general downward slide in the baseline quality of the daily strips, with most of them feeling like rote almost-joke wry observations about current events than anything approaching the inspired combination of incisive observation and clever artwork that defines great political cartooning. I mean, like, c'mon man, what are we doing here?*

There's a bigger issue at play that makes me feel as though maybe it's good that The Nib is more-or-less-voluntarily surrendering the throne as the Leftist Political Cartooning Institution Of Note: the print collections 100% make me want to die. The last 6 print collections have sat unopened on my shelf because while I value The Nib and the work of its contributors, those books are pure psychic poison that I simply have not had the mental capacity to subject myself to for MONTHS. Like, we all enjoyed that one recent post about the funny hypothetical deer and how being hyper-aware of its surroundings isn't especially good for it, right? The Nib's print collections are like a pure uncut brick of that overstimulated-anxious-to-death ungulate misery. All their longform stuff is so, so, so, so fucking depressing. Harrowing, bleak, and utterly hopeless. Pure concentrated hemlock extract. And I know the reality of the global struggle shouldn't be sugar-coated but my Christ isn't there anything you sad fucks want to LIVE for? I can't take any more 8-page autobios about grief and despair and hypocrisy and cruelty and pointless endless evil. You can't sustain an audience on doomerism, no matter how well-intentioned.

I mean, The Nib's subheader is even "Rise and Shine. The World is Doomed.", and, like, FUCK, man! I've been getting that in my inbox for ten years. Who wants to get marching orders from someone who's apparently already given up the fight as lost?

So, yeah, all of that is to say that while it does sting somewhat, I think this is ultimately for the best. I'd like to see what progressive political cartooning can become in The Nib's absence, and I've got no doubt that the editorial team at very least will all land on their feet just fine. One day I'll work my way through those back issues.

*A bitchy little post-script: I think having a 'daily comics' component of the publication was honestly a pretty bad play because it means all your social feeds are getting clogged by unfunny glurge from lesser wits like Sorensen, Sayers, and Wells, when that money COULD be spent on letting much better, more interesting cartoonists like Mady G. and Derek M. Ballard do their thing.