Satirical comics magazine The Nib announced yesterday that they are shutting down their operations. The publication’s Future issue will be their last. In a newsletter, editor and publisher Matt Bors said, “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.”
He adds, “The Nib will likely reconvene for an anthology or special projects some day. But I don’t want to lead with that as if this is some sort of media pivot. The daily comics and the print magazine will come to an end and we will cease publishing. What has been my job for the last ten years — truly my dream job — will end and I don’t have plans beyond that.”
Originally launched on Medium in 2013, The Nib spun off onto its own platform in 2015, and partnered with First Look Media the following year. An animated series premiered online in 2017, and the print version launched in 2018. They also crowdfunded an anthology, “Be Gay, Do Comics,” which was published by IDW. First Look ended their partnership in 2019, forcing The Nib to rely on subscriptions.
Over the course of the last decade, The Nib has published more than 6,000 comics, and paid out more than $2 million to creators. It has received multiple awards and nominations, including a 2019 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series, and that year’s Ringo Award for Best Webcomic. Kendra Wells, who described The Nib as their most consistent employer, said “It really, really sucks to see publications that advocate and support artists fold under the crushing pressures of the algorithm and various whims of megacorps. The Nib is going away, and that leaves the artists it employed with one fewer outlet to rely on.”
Among those who saluted The Nib after hearing the news were Cory Doctorow, and The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, who said, “The Nib is a singular accomplishment. There was nothing like it when it started, and there will be nothing like it when it’s gone. I’ll miss it a great deal.” Doctorow placed particular emphasis on Bors’s 2016 comic strip “Mister Gotcha,” which he called “the single most effective rebuttal to the most annoying Reply Guys on the whole internet.”
You can order the final issue of The Nib here.
