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Long-time comics site The Nib has announced its closure

The Nib is set to cease print publication with its next issue and shutter its online publication this summer.

Black white and yellow logo that reads The Nib in stylized type and features a yellow nib logo
Image credit: The Nib
Tiffany Babb avatar
Feature by Tiffany Babb Deputy Editor
Updated on

Today, in a statement from editor and publisher Matt Bors, it was announced that acclaimed outlet The Nib is closing down, finishing their print publication with their upcoming Future issue and shuttering web publication in August.

This announcement follows a few years of rocky publication status for The Nib, which was originally funded by and located at Medium. In 2015, when Matt Bors left the company, he took the site with him, and in 2016, he announced a partnership with First Look Media.

This partnership lasted until 2019, when First Look Media announced that they were pulling funding from the publication and had laid off The Nibs' staff. In response, Bors announced that he would continue to publish The Nib through member support with a subscription service.

As to what is behind this closure, Bors writes in his statement, "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."

Though The Nib will no longer be maintaining it's regular publishing sevices, Bors mentioned in his statement that The Nib is likely to return for an anthology or special projects in the future. (The Nib has previously published anthologies including Eat More Comics! in 2015 and Be Gay Do Comics in 2019.) However, Bors clarifies that, in regards to these future projects, "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."

Existing memberships will be upheld until the site's closure. In the short term, the site's webstore remains active.

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