#the nib

[lucybellwood]

Another piece I did for The Nib back in 2015! Gonna keep posting these until they shut down at the end of the summer. It was such a treat to hear that Matt and the whole editorial team just won an Eisner for their work on the magazine and website. Much-deserved.

Anyway: this is a parody and isn't representative of every screenwriter's experience, but it certainly feels relevant with all the strikes rolling out right now. Did you know what kind of credit you get on a film directly impacts how much you're paid? For writers you'll see "created by," "written by," "story by," and all sorts of other things, all of which translate to different levels of compensation! (Highlander, for example, has Story by Gregory Widen and Screenplay by my dad and his writing partner, Larry Ferguson.) The Writer's Guild is often responsible for arbitrating those decisions. They have a whole MANUAL to help writers understand the process. It rules.

Thanks, WGA. Thanks, The Nib. (And you can always make more of these comics possible on Patreon.)

[berniesrevolution]

We Have to Protect the Trees We Have Left

Without reducing the global rates of deforestation, humanity probably can’t prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

by Eleri Harris

(Continue Reading)

Thenib.com

@thenib

[sagecoffey]

I can't believe it's been 3 years since my top surgery! I maintain it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. Trans Day of Visibility is more than showing that we exist - It's proving our survival.

We will ALWAYS be here.

This comic was for The Nib's FUTURE issue.

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: The Nib

the kind of essay comics published in The Nib (now sadly defunct) tended to lean towards illustrative panel contents. in a lot of their comics, the images show, basically, what the text describes. it's a way of producing comics that emphasizes clarity of information delivery and tends to have some level of redundancy, with relatively straightforward metaphors. one piece in the "color" issue by Erlend Sandøy bucks that trend in really extravagant fashion. the comic goes against an awful lot of conventional advice about clarity of panel layouts, often choosing sprawling nonlinear layouts or notional strips that run from top to bottom (see the two pages above). the metaphors also come thick and fast, and although most are straightforward there's enough just happening on every page that it enforces a kind of slower exploration of the details.

like, I love the way color (fittingly) and composition work in the fourth page. the smiling bike riders in the bottom catch me, they're discordant with the primary subject of the page--the failure of green parties in coalition to enact their plans and stick to their promises. what's harder to see at a quick glance is the third bike rider who's careened straight into the smog that makes up the frame. it's obscure enough in the print that I totally missed it and put my big dumb fat fingers over it when I was taking the photo! 😩 it's a fun little trick cause it takes the frame, which I think tends even when representational to recede into the background, into another area of panel content. but more than that it brings into sharper focus the overall rhetoric of the page: that green movements have achieved mainly small areas of apparent natural recovery, pushing the deeper structural issues to the margins of discourse. those issues are, however, inescapable.

(I do think the bit about the german greens totally failing to reduce coal power but succeeding in banning nuclear power is quite funny, like gosh do you think those two facts might have some causal relationship? ha ha oops)

the sprawling nonlinearity is also really well suited to a page like the overview of the countries where green parties hold power, which IS a sprawling, informationally non-hierarchical subject. how the reader navigates this page doesn't matter, and it's nice to see someone breaking from the McCloudian/Eisnerian focus on the sequence as be all end all. more than that, though, I just think it's clever and charming! What a good looking gosh darned page! composing the globe out of foliage and having pop-out informational panels be branches with their own leaves? it's great stuff, a pretty immediately graspable visual device that's both pertinent and super flexible. there's all these interesting little details--like look at the ballots flowing out of the US like leaves stuffing that ballot box, juxtaposed with the text pointing out that first past the post means all these votes go, essentially, into the void. the image doesn't make that last bit clear, and the text doesn't spell out the leaf metaphor, it's a gestalt. that's comix, baby! awoo!

the whole coverage within this comic in particular feels like a very even handed account of the green political movement's achievements and also some of its ideological failures--again, often conveyed not directly through fairly neutral text but instantiated in the art itself. it's just one of a number of comics in this issue that feel bold and experimental, and when I first wrote this review in 2023 I suggested picking up a copy of the Color Issue. in fact, it looks like you still can--I guess that must be one issue that remains in stock. but The Nib itself is no more and most of its issues, including gems of experimental documentary comicking like this, are out of print. thankfully, on the way out founder Matt Bors decided to put the entire collection onto the Internet Archive. you can read the color issue there.

this review originally ran on Cohost, Thu, Feb 23, 2023. I am porting these reviews with minor editing over to Tumblr and eventually to my own website, because websites and periodicals may die, but comics are forever.

[wardsutton]

I feel the country is caught in the worst repeat cycle possible, and as such I'm going to be reposting my cartoons from the Trump years because sometimes drawing new ones feels incredibly redundant. Like today, leading up to tonight's acceptance speech, pundits are STILL pining for the "he'll redeem himself" narrative. Here's my cartoon for The Nib from back in 2017:

[terror-billie]

The Nib is no longer going to make new comics and they've put all their PDFs up for free, with an option to make a donation to the archive if you like.

The Nib is an online satire comic created by Matt Bors, who made the "we should improve society somewhat" comic

The comics feature a variety of authors telling their stories and making political satire.

[eastsidemags]

Tale of One-Inch Bozo Signing

East Side Mags is stoked to announce that we’ll be hosting local comic creator Taku Ward and his newest comic creation - THE TALE OF THE ONE-INCH BOZO!

About the comic: "The Tale of One-Inch Bozo" is a 40-page, all-age adventure comic about a one-inch tall boy who gets lost in a forest filled with all sorts of dangerous animals and monsters. A retelling of the Japanese folktale, "The One-Inch Samurai," read to find out what it really takes to become a samurai as a one-inch boy in a big, big world.

About the creator: Taku Ward is a cartoonist born and raised in New Jersey. He attended and graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a Bachelor's Degree in Cartooning in 2020. His comics have been published in anthologies such as Level Ground Comics' "The Greatest Hits: A Comic Mixtape," Chidrawgo's "I Like Robots," and The Nib's "Cities" issue. During his free time, Taku likes to work on his comics, go on walks, and pet his cats.

This comic is perfect for all ages including kids so bring the family, your friends and yourself and come on down and check out this amazing comic by an equally amazing creator! And support local creators and comics!

[thoughtportal]

I’m afraid I have some bad news. After ten years of publishing, The Nib is going to close down this summer. The new issue of our magazine, the Future issue, will be our last. We will continue to publish online every weekday through August and then shut down.

To all those who have supported us and published with us, thank you. To the readers whom I know this disappoints, I’m sorry, but it couldn’t be avoided.

If you’re a member: You don’t have to do anything. Your membership will continue through August and then be automatically canceled. During that time we will be publishing daily as usual, including new comics from our regular lineup.

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.

I didn’t want to shut down overnight. That felt too abrupt and I’d like to do right by our contributors and editors. We still have an entire magazine’s worth of comics that deserve to be published online, and continuing the site through the summer allows us to get some much needed funds for paying our bills, setting up some long term measures to preserve the website, and paying all of our editors a severance.

If you’re not a current member of The Nib, you can buy the Future issue here as well as the back stock of magazines we have in our store.

I’ll also add that 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.

This great team of editors and contributors I’ve assembled will then be scattered, but I know the plan for all of us will be the same: continue to make comics. I will have more to say about our decade of publishing closer to when we shut down, but for now I’d like to acknowledge the editors who helped shape the publication over the years: Eleri Harris, Mattie Lubchansky, Andy Warner, Whit Taylor, and Shay Mirk, as well as our print designer Mark Kaufman, and of course our countless contributors.

Thanks for reading and supporting us all these years.

Matt Bors, Editor and Publisher (2013-2023)

[lucybellwood]

Sharing another longer comic I made for The Nib back in 2016, since they'll be shutting up shop at the end of this year. This piece was such a great excuse to dig deep into the world of sail-powered cargo! I particularly loved talking to the team behind Ceiba, who are now years into their build and documenting the entire shipbuilding process along the way.

(Dig this? There's always room for more passengers aboard the good ship Patreon.)

[berniesrevolution]

Marea Verde Rising

Unstoppable Latin American activists made green the color of abortion rights – now, the U.S. needs the “green wave” more than ever.

by Sarah Mirk and Laura Athayde

(Continue Reading)

TheNib.com

@thenib​

[wakewithgiggli]

[them-faetale]

A new luddite movement would be no bad thing.

(Comic by Tom Humberstone via The Nib - which is sadly closing)

[graphicpolicy]

Around the Tubes

Some comic news and reviews from around the web to start the day #comics #comicbooks

It’s a new week and we’ve got a lot coming. There’s still SDCC and Otakon coverage and so much more. Stay tuned! We’re kicking off the day with news and reviews from around the web in our morning roundup. Deadline – ‘The Incredible Hulk’ Director On The Scrapped Sequel Plans: “There Was A Lot Of Good Stuff We Were Planning” – Better than bad stuff. Kotaku – Fortnite Has A Museum Dedicated To…

[anarchistettin]

I feel like The Nib wouldn't have sank if it had struck a harder leftist line. Libs were always going to stick with The Funny Times pap. Every time I felt like the nib had published something that was For Real, I'd end up wading through just as many centrist dem slaps in the face as any other rag, trying to find more of the same.

shouldn't've courted them libs, ol' Nibs.