For the second year, we have put together a ‘Best Small Press’ category for our Year in Review series. And, also for the second year, the Nib was our top choice for that category. We thought it would be interesting to talk with the Nib’s founder, Matt Bors, about the company, his own work, and more.
What’s retirement like? Is it everything it’s cracked up to be? Or are you itching to do some more cartooning, though in a manner closer to the features in the magazine than the daily strips?
Matt Bors: I am working full time running The Nib and working on a few side projects, primarily as co-writer of a comic book series that will launch next year. It’s not announced yet, so I have to remain quiet about the details, but it’s a violent political genre comic and something that should satisfy longtime readers of mine. I am itching to draw more too. I did manage to draw two new strips for our recent Nature and Secrets issues of the magazine, but that’s it. It’s been the longest stretch without drawing much that I have done in my adult life and I’m hoping to change that in 2022.
We have to ask the obvious question. Has it gotten easier for your staff to do their pieces now that Trump is out of the White House and they don’t have to figure out how to make the ludicrousness of reality even more ludicrous?
MB: I think Trump being gone has reduced the anxiety some, but we’re still in this never-ending pandemic. I think it does feel like the political scandals, authoritarian overreaches, and culture wars have dialed back a tad though. In the summer of 2020, with the pandemic raging, hundreds of thousands dying, and Trump’s federal agents attacking protesters in Portland, where I was living at the time, things felt like they were coming undone. Indeed, the next thing that hit us were the massive wildfires. I don’t want to ever go back to that time but we may be looking at levels of it in the future with climate change.
To answer the question more directly, about the cartoons, yes, I think everyone welcomes a non-Trump regime and not having to grapple with how to attempt to satirize them every week.
What have some of the challenges been for The Nib during 2021, both related to larger issues (pandemic, supply chain, etc.) and internally?
MB: We have weathered the pandemic okay, but supply chain issues have affected the magazine especially in regards to paper pricing, which has jumped a lot. We have been hit with some bills larger than I expected and we’re adjusting to that. Nothing to really be done about it at this point. It’s affecting everyone in the industry. Internally, I brought on a part time publishing assistant who has been helping me a lot on the business side of things, get stabilized, and get caught up on some things that fell by the wayside the last year or two while just trying to keep the publication going online and in print.
Where do you see The Nib in 2 years, in 5? Is it more long-form historical features? Personal pieces like “In/vulnerable,” your partnership with Thi Bui and Reveal? A higher dosage of topic, short-form political cartooning?
MB: I hope we can continue that long, but I honestly don’t know how things will chance. I have been so focused on just keep the publication going and getting the print magazine back on schedule, which we did this year, that I haven’t considered any major changes to anything. I like the mix of political cartoons and longer journalistic comics we have. I’d certainly like to run more longer and ambitious comics, like the “In/vulnerable” series you mentioned, but the truth is doing these kinds of comics take an incredible amount of time, energy, and money to produce. We’re still a very, very small publication—smaller than we used to be while funded by media companies with deep pockets. That era is over for us and a lot of people now so we rely entirely on readers for support. But each year we have ended with more members than we had the year before, so in five years I’d like the pandemic to be a memory and us publishing more work than we are today.
Continued below
You’ve been covering the pandemic from all sorts of angles for the whole time, even putting out a special issue of the magazine on the topic in 2020. Since the release of that issue, what are some of the ways you think we have, or have not, learned or changed as a country?
MB: Our Pandemic issue is an interesting document of the first year of the pandemic. It still holds up, but at the time we did not know when it would end or how bad it would be. I think in some respects things are worse, there are multiple waves of this, and it feels never ending. But when we made the issue a vaccine had not even been developed and seemed a lot further off than it was, and as a result things are depicted as being very dire—because they were. 800,000 people in the US are dead so far. I remember when a quarter of that amount felt like an impossible number to wrap your head around. We’ve adjusted to a lot.
I live in Canada now and it’s given me a different perspective on the US in regards to the pandemic. Here there is less Covid, a much higher vaccination rate, and mask mandates were never lifted. There were more lockdowns and they weren’t fun but there also wasn’t a massive culture war over them or the levels of anxiety I see in a lot of people in the US where the disease has felt everywhere due to high infection rates. I live in a small town and don’t do much at all, which is different from living in a large city in the US, or a heavily unvaxxed pocket of the country. So a lot of that comes from the anti-vax movement and their refusal to help end this, but the government has failed at multiple levels along the way. It really seems like the US is in an irreversible decline. There’s stuff that this pandemic pushed to the breaking point that can’t be put back together easily.
