Political cartoonist and The Nib mastermind Matt Bors is moving to Canada.
No it’s not a political statement, it’s a financial and emotional statement.
Matt Bors has had a bad year.
Yeah, so has everyone. And sure, his year has included getting a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Editorial Cartooning—his second—and, in January, the birth of his second child.
But it’s also, as he recently told Oregon Public Broadcasting, “the worst year of my life.” His dad got cancer. Stuff around the house has randomly fallen apart. That’s on top of the pandemic, of course, and the loss of revenue that’s coincided with the economic hit sustained by many of the newspapers that used to run his barbed, politically subversive comics. (Including a certain Portland alt-weekly. No, the other one.) And now, this terrible, horrible, no good, very shitty year is about to reach its crescendo: He’s moving to Canada.
Matt talks to Willamette Week about leaving for Canada.
“I never wanted to leave Portland and I don’t really want to leave the U.S. but, you know … I mean I love the United States, it’s my country …”
I envy him.
Moving to Canada is the “crescendo” of his bad year? Like, it’s the worst thing of all? Is Bors being forced into this horrible fate worse than death?
Speaking as a Canadian, I’m hoping Matt stays where he is and doesn’t come up here to our miserable excuse of a country. We’ll hobble along without him, thanks anyway.