Matt Bors is done. The Pulitzer Prize nominated cartoonist puts down his pen and retires…at least where weekly political cartooning is concerned.

matt bors retires

In a blog post on his website, Matt Bors officially announced his retirement from 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.”

matt bors retires

As he explains,

“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.”

It won’t necessarily be a complete end to his political cartooning work but an end to the weekly pressures and grind to focus on other ambitious cartooning vistas, including for his daily comics journalism site The Nib, which he started in 2013. He also indicates where his creative energies are heading in the near future:

“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.”

Matt Bors started cartooning from a young age but took to weekly political cartooning on the student newspaper at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh – and until two weeks ago, never stopped.

For his editorial cartooning work, he has been nominated and a twice finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 and 2020. Also in 2012 he was the first alternative cartoonist to be awarded the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, The Nation and other publications. Since 2013 he has been the founder and editor of The Nib, a reader-funded daily political and non-fiction cartoon site.

For more Matt Bors reading, check out this interview he did ten years ago with the late great Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter.

We at The Beat wish him luck.