By Zack Quaintance — ShortBox — the Eisner-nominated, Ignatz award-winning independent comics publisher based in Yorkshire, England — has announced that it will wind down operations by the end of 2023. This marks the end of a run for Shortbox that began with its founding back in 2016 by Zainab Akhtar. Moving forward, the publisher’s relatively new online ShortBox Comics Fare will continue.

This was all announced over the weekend in a Twitter thread:

Hello. I’ll be winding down ShortBox for the end of 2023. We have 4 new graphic novels and an art book due to publish this year and those will be our final releases. I can’t express how grateful I am for all your support. Thank you so much.
— ShortBox (@Short_Box) April 3, 2022

As many others have pointed out in response, the winding down of ShortBox feels like part of a trend, one in which publishers of similarly-excellent idiosyncratic and experimental comics have also closed, including Koyama Press, AdHouse, and PEOW. Taken on the whole, these four publishers have been responsible for putting out some of the most interesting comics in recent years, experimental work from singular voices with strong aesthetic influences and poignant points of view.

ShortBox still has some comics to come, though, including two Kickstarter campaigns in May. All total, ShortBox by the end of the year plans to publish four new graphic novels an an art book.

While it certainly hurts to lose ShortBox and other similarly-bold publishers, they leave a long and excellent body of work. Just today, for example, we have an excellent piece by Arpad Lep looking at one such publication specifically from ShortBox, with Joe Sparrow’s Homunculus. In brief, ShortBox has long made really surprising and special comics; their contribution to the medium was vital; and they will be missed. Guess there’s not much more to say past that than, thanks for the comics.

You can find more information about ShortBox on its website, complete with an online store where plenty of excellent comics remain for sale.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He has written about comics for The Beat and NPR Books, among others. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.