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 channel. We 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.
Professional Artist and Writer, Michael Walsh, will give a detailed review of your portfolio and provide areas of improvement and advice on next steps. Submit your portfolio for review here: Michael Walsh Portfolio Review Submissions. Please include a mix of primarily interior pages and a few covers or pin-ups drawn in a consistent style. Your […]
You got accepted to your first event! Great! Now what are you going to bring? Tune in for this panel, Tabling at Conventions for Beginners, to get the 101! In this panel we will cover everything from types of events, what to bring with you, emergency supplies, presentation, and table etiquette. So if you’re totally […]
A freelancer’s perspective from behind the curtain of subscription campaigns, building online presence, social media, and support work. There is a lot to being a creative, especially as you build a progressively bigger following. From making canned messages, evergreen and supplemental content creation, templates, and a directory of fan mail answers are all on the […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
We know comics are a form of radical self-expression, but many of us don’t feel that way about our own. Join us for a workshop to challenge your writing and comic-making skills to create something beautiful, rich, and uniquely you. You will be guided step by step and finish with a one page comic that […]
Live round table with Jordie Bellaire. Jordie will critique the coloring portfolios of participants as a group. All skill levels welcome. For cartoonists and those with interest in becoming professional colorists. If you’d like to submit your portfolio for review, please follow this link to the submission portal! Catch a replay of this event on […]
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 […]
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 […]
