Thank you for joining us for our inaugural Nib and Ink Fest! We had an incredible month of free events, ranging from panels on how to improve your comics craft to portfolio reviews. You can watch replays of every NIF event at the Cartoonist Cooperative’s YouTube channelWe hope you had a great time during NIF 2025, and we hope to see you again next year for NIF 2026!

*We are unable to offer VODs for “The Dangers of Influence, and the Unintentional Artist” and the NSFW Portfolio Review.

!!CANCELLED!! The Hand Behind the Pen: Analogue Art in the Digital Age

This panel has been cancelled due to the presenter’s personal circumstances. We hope to reschedule it in the future! We live in an age of computerized everything. Technology has made creating and distributing comics easier than ever before, but just like an EC horror story with an ironic twist every new development comes with a […]

How to Make a Newsletter Your Fans Love to Read

How do you make a newsletter that your fans want to read? This panel is for you! In How to Make a Newsletter Your Fans Love to Read, this informational panel will cover the basics of starting, running, and maintaining a newsletter to share your work and build community with your readers. If you have […]

How to Print a Comic: A Prepress Panel

What’s the right choice for binding your comic? What kinds of special effects do you want on the covers? What even is a DPI? This panel seeks to answer some of those questions and more. Book designers and pre-press workers Carina Taylor and Hye Mardikian will speak to moderator Joan Zahra Dark about what you […]

Having Fun with Backgrounds

A lot of artists dislike drawing backgrounds. Partly because they are a lot of work but also because the characters and the story are the FUN part of making a comic. This panel is to go over how to approach backgrounds in a way that treat them as extensions of the characters and characters unto […]

Melo/Drama: A Dramatic Tension Workshop

Do all of your dramatic scenes sometimes feel a little flat? Do they sometimes feel like they’re over-the-top and a little too MUCH? Well there’s a time for drama and there’s a time for melodrama, and finding that line is often a balancing act between script, dialog, pacing, paneling, camera, balloons and art composition. In […]

Making of a Webcomic

Join Lacey of LIES WITHIN, Nero of ULTRAVIOLENTS and SPLIT CHECK, Bob of INTO THE SMOKE and DEMON OF THE UNDERGROUND, and Kody of KEEPING TIME as they chat about the different ways they approach crafting their webcomics. Each artist will share snippets from their process at varying stages: from script and thumbnails to pencils […]

Storytelling in Comics

Anyone can find a basic step-by-step guide to making comics, but how do you create comics and manga that truly make the reader FEEL something? Comic creators Michelle Stanford (Centralia 2050) and Matt McEwan (Ruin) break down how they use art, lettering, layout and sound effects to imbue every part of their comics with story. […]

Beginning to End: A Creative Process Conversation

Whether it’s for a webcomic, a self-published mini comic, a traditionally published graphic novel, or otherwise, each comic project has its own needs to meet its final form, and every comic creator has their own way of responding to that puzzle with their own creative process. Join our esteemed Cartoonist Co-op members Kody Okamoto (KEEPING […]