Welcome to the Multiversity Year in Review for 2021! To call this a weird year is a Hulk-sized understatement, but one thing that was a pleasant surprise was the sheer number of interesting and excellent comics that came out this year. We’ve got over 25 categories to get through, so make sure you’re checking out all of the articles by using our 2021 Year in Review tag.
3. Iron Circus Comics
Full disclosure that I am probably biased towards Iron Circus beyond just the books they put out. I’m friends with some of the staffers and I had the pleasure of interviewing publisher Spike Trotman for Robots From Tomorrow last year (http://www.multiversitycomics.com/podcasts/rft-688-cspiketrotman/). And even if you knew nothing about the Iron Circus slate of books, you would come away from listening to Spike talk about the company and her plans for it thinking it was exactly the type of publishing venture we need today. Their Kickstarter kung fu continues to be the strongest I’ve ever seen; not just having projects continually funded, but funded in multiples the original goal. And while they also have stretch goals, Spike & company have also built creator page-rate increases on top of their regular page rate into the amount raised — the more raised, the bigger the rate increase!
Just this year they put out the latest in their Cautionary Fables & Fairy Tales series of anthologies, The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Tales (spotlighting folklore from the Pacific region), Edwardian romance OGN Patience & Esther, one-woman cartoonist collection in Abby Howard’s Crossroads at Midnight, the afterlife anthology You Died, Jon Allen’s Julian in Purgatory OGN, and more. Plus they have a growing back catalog of series like Poorcraft or the long-running sex positive anthology Smut Peddler or OGNs like Evan Dahm’s The Harrowing of Hell or Kim Hyun Sook’s Banned Book Club.
So when you combine sharp professionals listening to their audience, with a passion for inclusivity and amplifying other voices, with paying a living cartooning wage, with the amount of talent, established AND new, Iron Circus has in their metaphorical Rolodex, you get a small publisher that won’t be able to fit in the ‘small’ category much longer. – Greg Matiasevich
2. ShortBox
What I look for most in a comics publisher is, besides the comics they produce, is how they work to improve the comics industry. ShortBox, formed by journalist and editor Zainab Akhtar in 2016, has from the outset tried to explore new ways to get good comics into the hands of readers. Originally a box subscription service, it has used avenues like Kickstarter and GumRoad to deliver a bevvy of stunning books to the world. Finding the subscription model too unwieldy in this ever-changing and chaotic world of global logistics, Akhtar has only this year put plans for future “boxes” on hold, and will now release books solely (and individually) through the internet. To that end, this year also saw ShortBox’s first attempt at a festival – the ShortBox Comics Fair. Running through the month of October, this exclusively online event helped connect readers to artists and their newest works amidst a world still very much affected by a global pandemic.
The recognition for the need for innovation in the industry aside, ShortBox also simply just puts out damned good books. This most recent, and final, ShortBox offering gave us five new books from cartoonists like Jack T. Cole and Xulia Vicente- my favorite, however, being Lily Blakely’s horror comic “Gristle,” a surrealist book about a fleshy plant that is a spiritual successor to the Charles Burns classic “Black Hole.”
Continued belowAkhtar has long been a strong, supportive voice in the world of independent comics, and her advocacy has stretched across multiple facets of the industry. ShortBox is a testament to the passion of comics fans, and a winning example of turning one’s passion for an art form into patronage for the art. – Johnny Hall
1. The Nib
A symptom of our current chaotic news cycle is that it’s nearly impossible to reflect on what has happened – and what continues to happen – with any sort of distance. It’s difficult to cope with the scale of tragedy and the bleakness of our future in a way that feels productive. For a comics fan, that challenge is compounded by an industry that largely stands to reinforce the current status quo at the behest of some of the biggest corporations on the planet.
Among the many marvels of The Nib, beyond just the S-tier cartoonist talent it has assembled, is its consistent ability to translate our current reality into something that’s both tangible and entertaining. Nowhere was that clearer than in The Nib’s Pandemic Issue, a deeply moving exercise that strikes a balance somewhere between a primal scream and a nod of recognition to our shared societal trauma.
That issue (and the Nib’s coverage of the pandemic more broadly) captures what makes The Nib unlike any other outlet in the comics landscape today. It would have been very simple for that issue to feel maudlin or, worse, to become corrosive with self-righteous anger. Instead, The Nib dug into the quieter tragedies of the pandemic, the ways life went on and didn’t, the fundamental shifts made in the infrastructure of our everyday lives. Their collaboration with Reveal focused a spotlight on inequity in the pandemic era, giving voice to unrecognized concerns both small and titanic. There was some fury, and a lot of tragedy, but the biggest feeling I was left with from The Nib’s storytelling was empathy.
The Nib is essential reading not just because it features the smartest and funniest political cartoons of our current era, but because the cartoonists are able to cut through the misery to find joy, soul, comedy, and beauty. The topics jump from the meaninglessness of “woke” discourse to the terrifying future of climate change to our government’s lackluster attempts to get anything done. No matter the subject, each final panel and punchline carries the weight of relatability. Like the best works of art to come out of the past few hellish years, The Nib’s cartoons find resonance in our shared experiences, colored with a refreshing – and wholly necessary – dose of whimsy. – Reid Carter
