Ed Piskor: 1982-2024

All the while, Piskor stayed silent. We know now he was plotting his suicide.

On Easter weekend 2024, alternative cartoonist Ed Piskor spent the holiday meticulously plotting the details of his suicide. That Monday, April 1^st, Piskor released an extensive suicide note online and completed the act.

A week earlier, he was discussing a book deal with Abrams, preparing for a potentially lucrative showing of his work at The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and recording videos for his popular YouTube show.

Thanks to his work on Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men Grand Design, Piskor developed a fanbase you wouldn't typically associate with most indie creators. He leveraged this popularity and created a successful YouTube channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe, with fellow indie artist Jim Rugg. The channel featured extensive interviews with very mainstream and very indie creators, but built its name on a regular series of reexaminations of Wizard: The Guide to Comics, a fanzine associated with the most absurd excesses of the 1990s comics scene.

Piskor was open about the influence of critically derided early '90s comics on his work, even as he sought an audience of those who tilt their nose upward at such material. (Listening to Piskor speak for more than thirty seconds would reveal far more admiration for Gary Groth than, say, Mark Gruenwald.) Some fans attracted to Cartoonist Kayfabe for the Wizard coverage didn't have the warmest of reactions to Piskor's frank dismissal of most mainstream pros as "jobbers" who lacked true creative vision. A creator who dissed Roger Stern comics as boring, lauded Rob Liefeld as an early influence, gleefully mocked fans who didn't abandon X-Men spinoffs for Acme Novelty Library, all while speaking exclusively in an odd amalgamation of '80s hip hop slang and pro wrestling lingo…well, you weren't getting this anywhere else on YouTube.

A week before his suicide, screenshots of Piskor's direct message conversations with a young female artist were circulating. The DMs were from nearly four years ago, during the days of Covid lockdowns. She was seventeen at the time, and even though none of the language was explicit, certainly the optics were awful for Piskor. The artist posted the screenshots as a self-deleting Instagram Story, and later clarified that she never met Piskor, that Piskor never sent her inappropriate photos, and never asked her to send him photos. She did feel in retrospect that he was in the wrong for engaging with her, though, and seemed to indicate that she had encouraged him because her then-boyfriend was a fan of Piskor's and found this amusing.

On social media, screenshots of the screenshots spread all weekend, prompting Piskor to shut down his social media, briefly take down the Cartoonist Kayfabe channel, and halt the planned video releases. In Piskor's suicide note, he claims that he immediately took steps to write a will after the leak of the DMs.

Only in this note, posted online hours (perhaps only minutes) before he killed himself, are we granted any insight into Piskor's thoughts during his week-long cancellation.

“I’m helpless against a mob of this magnitude. Please share my side of things. Sayonara.”

Piskor's cancellation was a curious thing to observe in real-time. Even though Piskor didn't seem to care about the ongoing culture war (that no one asked for and no one seems to like), he received shrapnel from all sides. One faction presented Piskor as just another hypocritical comics pro who'd been exposed as a pervert. He'd joined in on cancelling other people so now it was his turn. (A claim made with no evidence.) The other cast him as not only a groomer, but a "culture vulture" who never had any business creating a comic about the origins of hip hop.

A peculiarity of the current day has working comics professionals joining in with some of the sketchier elements of fandom in these public purity trials. In-between crafting stories about teenage hijinks or costumed crusaders for justice, they apparently can't resist a good gossip sesh online. There's at least one theory that says pros do this to kneecap other pros and pick up increasingly scarce freelance work. (One has to wonder if Don Heck was spreading scurrilous gossip about Herb Trimpe back in the day.) But it's not as if Piskor was competing for jobs on random Batman or Avengers spinoffs -- his aversion to the contemporary mainstream was always clear. I think the terminally online, terminally righteous are joining these mobs simply because they enjoy them.

A second allegation against Piskor emerged, something unprovable and the definition of "he said/she said," which stoked the fires. Others felt comfortable spreading a rumor that Piskor threw around "the n-word" liberally, another allegation with no evidence, outside of Piskor being a white guy really into hip hop.

When a Twitter account emerged, vigorously defending Piskor and mocking his accuser, an immediate consensus emerged amongst the comic professionals engrossed with the drama -- this was Piskor's alt account! No evidence, again, but instantly treated as gospel. (The "alt account" continued to post after Piskor's suicide.) A few of Piskor's industry peers mocked Piskor's physical appearance and ridiculed him as a middle-aged loser who could only attract young, naive girls as the week progressed, in addition to calling for Jim Rugg to finally renounce his friend and co-host.

During that week, the art show was postponed (but described as "cancelled" in the suicide note), the Abrams book deal apparently dissolved, and Jim Rugg publicly ended his working relationship with Piskor. A local news crew picked up the story, attempted to engage with Piskor's parents without their permission, and in the process doxed both Piskor and his parents' addresses. All the while, Piskor stayed silent. We know now he was plotting his suicide.

On his Facebook page, Piskor posted a link to the Google drive containing his six-page suicide note on the morning of April 1^st -- if he saw the potential humor of doing this on April Fool's Day, he didn't mention it. I've never read a suicide note before, and the hours between the link going up and the confirmation of Piskor's death were a sickening experience, one I'd like to never repeat.

Parasocial relationships are truly odd. I'd never met Piskor, had mixed feelings about some of his output, but we grew up reading the same material, both members of the final generation to discover comics on the spinner rack. I usually watched around five Cartoonist Kayfabe videos a week, so I'm as familiar with the sound of Ed's voice as I am with any of my relatives'. In some way, I did "know" the guy.

The details of his suicide note have been sanitized in most reports, possibly due to Piskor "naming names" of the comics pros he accused of murdering him. The fact that he called out those who continually speak about "kindness" and "justice," and allegedly hold considerable sway within the industry, might have made the situation too thorny for most to touch. Is Ed going to be receiving one of those two-page memorials in the upcoming Marvel releases? I'm guessing not.

“I wasn't AI. I was a real human being. You chipped little bits of my self-esteem away all week until I was vaporized.”

The behavior of some following the suicide was shockingly callous. Both sides of the culture war predictably pointed fingers at the other. As far as I know, no one apologized to Piskor's family, made any "take some time to reflect on my actions" pledges, or logged off social media for even a few days. Piskor wasn't willing "to do the work," of course, and the people claiming to be outraged over his death weren't really fans of his art, anyway. The only bad guy in this is the dead guy.

A few of those named by Piskor did express some contrition, to be fair, but there's a sense that the aligned comics community, whatever that might be, would rather this story go away. It doesn't feel as if the temperature's changed in any measurable degree, and perhaps I'm a cynic, but I doubt these same accounts will hesitate to join in on the next dogpile. Both Brian Wood and Brandon Graham have referenced suicide when discussing their previous experiences with whatever-we're-going-to-call-this. When Maneaters writer Chelsea Cain (a successful novelist who I assume didn't need anything from comics) experienced her own public de-personing via Twitter, her panicked, dejected social media posts indicated someone who might've been thinking similar thoughts. A Chelsea Cain who dabbles in comics can at least bail without any real disruptions to her life, an option Ed Piskor didn't see as viable.

The idea that anyone's faking distress over Piskor's suicide is pretty galling. Even if the man had never sold a comic, he was the personality behind a YouTube channel with nearly 100,000 subscribers. Cartoonist Kayfabe might not have been for everyone, but it was daily, passionate advocacy for the art of comics, covering everything from critically acclaimed indie releases to grist from the '90s speculator mill to reprint collections of classic newspaper strips. The interviews with creators were entertaining and informative, and some of them rank as genuine historical research. It was Kayfabe that brought Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, two guys who haven't spoken much since the '90s, back together for an issue-by-issue, page-by-page retrospective of the original TMNT comics. Those black-and-white indies are the genesis of a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar pop culture mainstay, and these videos are the most thorough documentation of their creation that's ever existed. Who else was doing anything like this?

I don’t think I ever had any online interactions with Piskor, and it's possible he would've sneered at my personal stack of longboxes ("Alan Davis? I guess that shit's drawn kinda pretty, but it's kinda wack, too.") His death hit hard because, a week prior, the man we saw producing daily YouTube videos wasn't contemplating taking his life. He had comics to create, deals to complete, continuity points to nitpick on X-Men '97. And even during his week of cancellation, I wouldn't have expected the scandal to drive him to suicide. In his videos, Piskor always discouraged creators from playing the role of the flighty artist; you had to know how business worked and how to set yourself up for retirement someday. His persona was absurd on some level, but he did come across as a sensible, even-keeled guy, an alternative artist from working class roots who was quite proud of being a homeowner and not a renter.

Why did Piskor view suicide as his only option? Even if he lost every deal and became an industry pariah, it's not hard to imagine him running a successful crowdfunder. (Perhaps with an "Unequivocally Disavowed by Jim Rugg!" blurb on the cover.) The YouTube channel didn't have to end…maybe the heat would've died down, maybe someone else would've joined as a co-host. He could've flipped through an old dollar-bin comic on his own and mocked the jobbers, if he wished.

Piskor was friends with artist/actor David Choe, who skated through a cancellation attempt only a few months ago. Maybe comics pros go harder on the cancellations. Maybe they're the kind that isn't fazed by being named in suicide notes.

I wonder now if even the thought of touching a comic during that week seemed like absolute hell. I wonder if he saw a future where he could never outlive this, that anyone who dared associate with him would also be tainted. Maybe Howard Chaykin or Geof Darrow would've done another interview, but knowing that you're setting one of your idols up for three consecutive weeks of concentrated scorn, ridicule, and “concerned” messages to their publishers, it's easy to see why Ed wouldn't bother to reach out in the first place.

“Once again, I'm guilty of being stupid. No doubt. But, that's all. I never thought in a million years that I'd take this step but I also never in a million years thought that something so Orwellian would ever happen to me.”

It's hard to appreciate how deeply the public humiliation cut -- Piskor certainly seemed to be a proud man, a nearsighted bald guy who only appeared on-camera with shades and a ballcap, someone who wanted his audience to know as he flipped through old Wizards that he was intimately familiar with the work of Adrian Tomine at the age of eleven. Piskor had the worst possible reaction to the scandal; locking his accounts and staying silent, while still paying intense attention to every word being spoken about him and keeping tabs of his peers that were joining the dogpile. Unless you live through it, I guess it's impossible to appreciate the depths communal mockery and professional isolation can send you to.

We'll never know how guilty or innocent Ed Piskor was, if time would've exonerated him or produced more skeletons from his closet. It's impossible to predict what his legacy will be. Online discourse is unlikely to change, and the odds are in favor of something similar happening in the future. Comics lost an advocate, a family lost a son, brother, and uncle, and what else is there to say?

On April 20^th, the family of Ed Piskor will host a tribute and art show to honor the creator's work. They're also accepting donations to help cover the funeral costs and attorney fees.