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A couple of years ago we were crowing with joy when Pulitzer Prize finalist cartoonist Matt Bors was hired to run Medium’s comics section, The Nib, and the results were glorious, with two years of daily content that was smart funny, trenchant, moving, eye opening and everything else we love about comics.
Well, as with most start-ups all good things must come to an end. Medium has restructured, laid off people and rethought its “content is king” strategy, wondered where the money went, as Fortune put it in the lugubriously headlined Looks like Medium isn’t going to save the media industry after all, and that’s okay. In recent months there’s been a big change at Medium and The Nib, changes which Bors did his best to explain, but during SDCC the other shoe dropped and Bors announced he was leaving Medium. A silent tear was wept for that paying job.
But, as a thoroughly modern cartoonist, Bors bounced back in mere days with….a Kickstarter! East More Comics! will be a massive 300 page compendium of the best of The Nib, with work by
Gemma Correll · Rich Stevens · Zach Weinersmith · Jon Rosenberg · Emily Flake · KC Green, Tom Tomorrow · Matt Bors · Jen Sorensen · Matt Lubchansky · Ann Telnaes · Brian McFadden · Liza Donnelly· Ruben Bolling · Ted Rall · Keith Knight, Andy Warner · Josh Neufeld · Susie Cagle · Emi Gennis · Ryan Alexander-Tanner · Eleri Harris · Erik Thurman · Jess Ruliffson · Sophie Yanow · Roxanne Palmer, Ron Wimberly · Erika Moen · Sarah Glidden · Wendy Macnaughton · Mike Dawson · Lucy Bellwood · Whit Taylor · Lisa Eisenberg · Eroyn Franklin · JJ McCullough, Kate Leth · James Sturm · Shannon Wheeler · Scott Bateman · Eleanor Davis · Maki Naro · John Leavitt · Kendra Wells
WHOA, maybe THIS is the new Kramers Ergot?
In his farewell on Medium, Bors announced that The Nib was coming with him and he hopes to announce a new plan with a publisher soon. So far from being the end of something cool, it’s just the beginning. The campaign is about half funded a week in but if they get to $60k, all the cartoonists get paid more. Make it so, people.
As reported last week, The Nib, the political comics site edited by Matt Bors and run by Medium, is undergoing some changes, and on Friday, Bors explained what’s what. Basically, the site is moving away from daily publishing—and won’t be running weekly comic strips any more—but will continue to publish editorial, satirical and journalistic pieces.
We will no longer be running certain work on certain days or with the same regularity. It’s a departure from what we’ve been doing, for sure, but I came here to experiment with publishing. You’ll see more of it in the coming weeks: response driven features, a new collective I’m building, and anything else I can think of to create interesting comics.
Here’s what isn’t changing: The Nib is always going to be a place for the sharp political cartoons, great journalism and essays that other media outlets are too uninventive or shortsighted to be commissioning themselves.
It will always be that.
In his time at The Nib, Bors has proven himself an exemplary editor, and given a platform to some powerful voices, so I have no doubt that as long as he’s running the ship, the Nib will remain a vibrant site. The once daily Nib newsletter will now go out once a week and spotlight other work by Nib contributors, among other chagnes. In his Friday post, Bors also mentioned a future Kickstarter to collect some of the work from the site—he
successfully Kickstarted a book of his Pulitzer Prize finalist comics back in 2012.
With all this talk of change, I wondered what was going on with Darling Sleeper, the indie comics site edited by Jesse Lucas, but it updated today so it seems to be carrying on as before.
Medium was launched as a site for “long form content” by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams two years ago, and like many start-ups is still looking for a revenue source, In december Williams was interviewed by USA Today and talked about the need to clarify what they were doing:
The 75-person start-up started by Williams and his Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, is used by up to 17 million people a month, including President Obama and Elon Musk. It has become an impressive forum for essays on tech and design, book chapters – even poetry.
“It’s easy to jump in and publish something aesthetically pleasing,” says Natalie Bartlett, community and content lead at Rough Draft Ventures in New York. For the past year, she has posted items of entrepreneurs on Medium.
Yet the 2-year-old writing platform is a work in progress amid so many content outlets online, summarily characterized by some as another vanity project by a tech exec dabbling in journalism (see Pierre Omidyar, First Look Media; and Chris Hughes, The New Republic).
In April Williams spoke with Wired about the site,
bravely championing quality content before clickbait. The Nib was definitely the former, and hopefully it will continue to develop in that direction.
The Nib is the best comics site out there, with new comics every day from some of the greatest cartoonists working. Edited by Matt Bors, it’s a model of how a comics site can be sharply observent and politically relevant, and yet still be good comics overal, with both editorial cartoons—Tis Modern World, Tom the Dancing Bug, Slowpoke, Bors own strip—and new work by folks like Emily Flake, Lisa Hanawalt, R Stevens, Ted Rall, Brian McFadden, Erika Moen, Shannon Wheeler and more more more. A whole generation of incisive non-fiction cartoonists, given a paying platform to work for.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to be around in the same form any more.
The Nib is part of Medium, a start up that is devoted to “long form reads.” Like many start ups, it doesn’t have any visible means of making money, so while the site employed Bors and paid cartoonists to create new work, as I all too presciently suggested, that model was too radical to work forever.
I should note that I have no idea what the changes will be. Assistant editor Eleri Mai Harris was let go a few weeks ago, the first warning sign, and now the cartoonists who were syndicated on the site, such as Tom Tomorrow and Ruben Bolling, as indicating they they will not appear there any more. Bolling wrote:
Hey, Tom the Dancing Bug ran regularly on Medium.com’s comic site, The Nib, for about a year and a half, but I’m told that due to changes at Medium, The Nib will be reinventing itself, and will not carry comics on regular basis anymore.
I’ve been tremendously impressed with Nib founder/owner Matt Bors and the way he built the site up. I’d known him as a young, very talented editorial cartoonist, and a friend, but once he grabbed the reins of The Nib he proved himself to be an endlessly energetic, brilliantly innovative editor and comics impresario. He developed a large, flexible roster of cartoonists and ran fascinating journalism comics, hilarious and fresh humor comics, heart-wrenching autobiographical comics, and on a moment’s notice he would figure out a way to round up local cartoonists to comment on international stories. He also did all this with great organization, professionalism, integrity and respect for the artists he gathered.
My comic played a small part in Matt’s grand webcomics project, but I was proud to be associated with it.
The Nib is not going away, and I’ll be watching (and maybe even participating in small ways) how Matt reinvents it, quite possibly in ways that even better lend themselves to his unique editorial talents and vision.
Just as a reminder, here are the most recent comics to appear on the site, a look at the meat industry by Mike Dawson, Longstreet Farm, that will make you uncomfortable
And Eleanor Davis’s The Highgate County Fancy Chicken Show, which, like most of her work, is a multi leveled indictment of stereotypes, fat shaming and other shade we throw at people for no reason whatsoever.
These are good comics, and The Nib was full of them.
I’ve reached out to Bors for further information, but I do know that The Nib will be continuing, so let’s not write an obituary just yet. But everytime i clicked on the site, I thought “This is too good to last” and sadly…I was right.
Here’s a selection of twitter outrage over the change — even CNN’s Jake Tapper got in on the action.
I just interviewed Jen Sorenson about her similar gig at Fusion.net the other day. Hopefully this lasts a lot longer.
On Monday, James Sturm, cartoonist and director of the Center for Cartoon Studies, posted a cartoon at The Nib called “The Sponsor”. I’m sure if you are a cartoonist you’ve already read it, since it was the talk of the town for a few days. Basically it concerns cartoonists, jealousy, the low bar for success, anxiety over one’s abilities, tumblr hits, Kickstarter and more. All in 24 panels. I’d call that a good job.
The basic conceit is that as in various 12-step programs, (the subtitle is “The first step is admitting you have a problem”) cartoonists have sponsors they can call in moments of stress. A young cartoonist named Casey calls his sponsor, Alan, in the middle of the night to fret about another cartoonist named Tessa who has a six figure Kickstarter, a line out the door at a Rocketship signing, and a book deal with D&Q. Tessa’s success sends Casey into such a tizzy that he has to work things out and consider grad school, despite Alan’s insistence that Crumb never thought about hits. And despite his “stay strong” rhetoric to Casey, Alan soon picks up the phone to call his OWN sponsor.
Of course we all know that judging your own success by someone else’s is a short cut to despair. By the same token, we’ve all done what Casey does, looked at other people’s book deals, Facebook likes, retweets or dinner companions and found ourselves feeling shitty about someone else’e\s perceived success. It’s human nature. You do it, I do it, we all do it. And then, if we want to actually be a success in some measure, we move on.
I know this cartoon ignited much talk in cartooning circles, but the one I caught spun out of this one by Colleen Frakes:
You can see the responses from MK Reed, Johanna Draper Carlson, Mike Dawson, Alison Wilgus and more. To be honest, the gender question here is, for once, a red herring. I think Sturm’s satire—and it is a satire, not an autobiographical comic—was based on the image of two white guys fretting over the success of a younger female cartoonist. That was kinda the POINT. This cartoon was about the toxic effects of jealousy not about gender relations—that the more successful, nimble cartoonist is a woman backs up setting as the twilight of the “pap pap era” that is implied by the reference to Crumb.
Another subtext of “The Sponsor” is that Alan and Casey are only reacting to the external aspects of Tessa’s career, and eschewing an examination of the artistic merits of her work that might lead to inspiration as opposed to mere envy. We get better at what we do by studying better things, and applying what makes them better to our own work, in a sensible way. Easier said than done, I know.
BTW, for those who think this is a lonely cry for acceptance by a put upon white male cartoonist, more of those thoughts are publicly expressed in this Metafilter thread, including guesses as to the real Tessa and so on. Come on people…IT’S A SATIRICAL STORY. I am well aware that all art is filtered through the social status of the creator, but but interpreting all storytelling as confirmation bias is the ultimate no-win situation. Can you imagine if Dan Clowes’ “Dan Pussey” came out today?
No, “The Sponsor” is about insecurity and the trivial uncontrollable fretting that destroys your own creativity. A few years ago I linked to this piece by Rob Liefeld called “How to Beat The Haters”, and you know, if Rob Liefeld can do it any one can—although external criticism is far from the corrosive internal struggle discussed in “The Sponsor.” But some of the same rules apply. You can only control one person’s work—your own. And yes, I am aware of the irony of quoting a cartoonist whose entire career seems oblivious to the painful self-examination Casey and Alan are dealing with. The way forward lies somewhere in the middle.
Kind of tangential to this, but I’ve updated the Beat’s “How to Get Into Comics and Survive Once You’re There” page with a few links. It’s still only an outline. Share more resources or self-help or ideas for what Casey and Alan should do in the comments.
And a final PS: Man, the Nib is awesome. That is all.
Did I get tricked into running this somewhat non-slick infographic because The Beat is ranked #8 in a list of the top 100 comics blogs? You bet. But I did like that The Nib is #1. I think the chart went by Alexa rankings and it includes webcomics among the blogs, which doesn’t really make any sense. And essential sites like Comics Reporter, Robot 6, Comics Alliance, and about 800 more are missing. But anyway, talking points.
What do YOU think are the top comics sites? Besides the obvious—CBR, BC, Comicbook.com? Talk about it in the comments.
Alert the media! Everyone was excited last year when Award-winning cartoonist Matt Bors got hired by the Medium to edit an actual comics page, The Nib, the cartooning world stood up and cheered at an editorial cartoonsits getting a paying job. And not he’s turned around and hired another cartoonist! Tasmanian transplant Eleri Mai Harris has just been hired as Associate Editor for The Nib and will help with finding contributors, editing comics as well as penning her her comics.
The Beat first met Harris at Career Day at CCS, where was was studying, and were immediately impressed by her background—print journalism—and how she had applied it to comics. Journalistic comics are a growing field, and it’s the smart people like Bors and HArris who are making it happen.
You can see Harris’s own comics at her site. I like this one about the history of the New Hampshire primary. Comics help us learn!
This is depressing and frustrating, and another example of why I’ve been reluctant to catalog webcomics for our library’s catalog. Free content I’d gotten cataloged had gone over to Comixology, and now our links are dead. And sites like The Nib, which I’d gotten cataloged to make it easier for my patrons to discover, are now no longer what we described:
http://clio.columbia.edu/catalog/10906030