I’m Quitting Political Cartooning
After 18 years and more than 1,600 political cartoons, I’ve decided to retire my weekly comic. This is a decision long in the making, one I’ve slowly walked myself up to over the years, and have recently decided is time to commit to. My last cartoon was two weeks ago.
I will continue to run The Nib in an almost full time capacity, publishing and editing our magazine and daily comics, while making some space in my life for other kinds of comics that I’m excited about but have never had the time to fully pursue.
I want to do more nonfiction cartooning at The Nib— the interviews and journalism I have only been able to do in between the cracks of my deadlines— and I’m actively preparing pitches as a writer on some fiction comics. It’s time for me to work in longer formats and dip into all the kinds of comics I love and want to create. I’ll also be serving as an Advisor for Tinyview, a promising new comics app, where I’ll be bringing in an array of comics across many genres. (You can download it here.)
So I will be staying busy, as always. Something had to give in my life to make room for other things and, frankly, it was an easy decision. I’ve drawn political cartoons every week since I was 19 and feel like I have said everything I can say, often a few times over. I know this may be disappointing to longtime readers, but my creative desires pull me in another direction, one where I hope to create more work on par with what I’ve done in this field. I also owe it to both The Nib’s readers and creators to keep the publication going as long as possible.
I doubt that I have drawn my last political cartoon of all time. I can of course draw them as ideas and time allow down the road, but this is the end of my regular weekly strip and I expect it to be a hard break for quite a while as I focus on other kinds of cartooning.
Thank you for reading all these years. I know a few people who have been reading since the beginning (besides my Mom), through the dark Bush years, the rise of social media, the collapse of alt-weeklies, the rise (and then collapse) of online media. Trump! A pandemic! Here I am. I made it through all that and want to go out on my own terms now.
I doubt I will miss having a weekly deadline, but I know I’ll miss political cartooning in many ways—wrestling with political issues, connecting with readers, whiling away my time at the drawing table. Now I’m going to find ways to do all of those things in a different way.
Sign up to support The Nib, keep that going, and see the work I do there. I’m not above plugging it in a post like this—we’re entirely reader supported. And sign up to my newsletter for updates on anything I do in the future. There will no longer be a weekly cartoon there, but knowing me it won’t be too long before I have something to show you.
