Fucking Ed Piskor. The whole thing surrounding Piskor and the women he had gross interactions with and his eventual suicide has hit me hard. The voyeurism of watching it unfold over a week, the polarization of folks using the whole thing as a rallying cry to illustrate their stance on cancel culture (pro or con), the victim blaming, the politics, and the absurd assumptions that folks “know” what happened in any facet of the situation. First and foremost, I don’t want to get into the specifics of the situation of what transpired between Ed Piskor and the Women he hurt or offended because it’s none of my damn business. I don’t personally know any of them and am only mutual social media friends with one of them; and in a public forum, my thoughts on the matter are irrelevant. If you don’t know the situation, or who Ed Piskor is, google will answer all questions adequately. I have no intention of defending or condemning Ed (not my place or job), nor do I want to do the same for the Women, again not my place.
So why am I writing about this? There are a few reasons, but first and foremost it’s because I need to be better. Over the past week, I got sucked into the drama of the situation on Twitter because I was shocked and curious. I discovered Ed Piskor’s work over the last year and a half while it seemed like my current obsessions and interests kept intersecting with him. So I couldn’t help myself, and I kept checking in on Twitter to see what was happening next. Some folks were attacking him publicly and others vehemently defended him, and I watched with a morbid curiosity that upon reflection feels (almost) complicit.
And that’s a tricky word, complicit. “Involved with others in an illegal activity or wrongdoing.” How was I being complicit? Well, even though I made no comments on the situation, and threw no stones, I wasn’t drawn into the discourse in a natural way. My interest in Ed Piskor goes back a couple of years, and I’ve had some short tertiary discussions with friends about his work. But I didn’t discover this current situation through conversation with friends, or even as a prompt for one of their retweets or mentions. No, I clicked on a trending topic on twitter when I saw his name pop up, and I clicked on it fully knowing that the likelihood of what I was going to discover was probably gross or at the least involved internet drama. I was looking for the car crash, and I found it. Then I watched it, rubbernecking, for an entire week until Ed Piskor took his own life.
And now I feel sick to my stomach, sad and frustrated. My heart hurts for everyone involved. EVERYONE. Ed’s family, the Women, all of their friends, and yes, Ed himself. Because though I wasn’t involved in this, I had some experience with a situation like this when my sister took her life almost a decade and a half ago. I’m not claiming to have any special insight into suicide, and I’m sure as hell not trying to co-opt this tragedy, but there are echoes of what just happened with what went down with my sister, and it breaks my heart and picks at scabs that I’m afraid are never going to heal.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been reading a ton of comic books, reacquainting myself with the form after straying away from regularly reading for almost 20 years. Simultaneously I’ve also been giving myself a history 101 primer on Hip Hop as it’s a genre of music I am the least familiar with and I want to change that. Lastly, I’ve been doing some pretty deep dives into watching YouTube channels in preparation for trying my hand at adding video content to what I do online. Ed Piskor has made a name for himself in all three of these areas, writing and illustrating comics, specifically comics about the history of Hip Hop, and with his comic creator friend Jim Rugg, he co-hosts the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel that is popular and was exactly the kind of show I was curious to learn from. Hell, I’ve also been diving back into trading card collecting and after picking up a copy of the Abrams book collecting all of the Jim Lee X-Men cards from the 90s, Ed has an eloquent introduction to the volume.
So I was hip deep in familiarizing myself with Ed’s work for a while now, and when the shit hit the fan this past week I gawked.
I need to be better.
This is a sentiment that I dwell on a lot when it comes to writing, podcasting, and the thoughts I share both here on my site and on the various social platforms I hang out on. When I say to myself that I need to be better, it’s usually about curbing my impulses to bring the negativity, to give my two cents about what didn’t work for me in the pop culture I devour. And it’s a struggle for me. The push and pull usually happens when I’m writing down my thoughts on Letterboxd or GoodReads, where it’s kind of hard to sidestep reviewing/rating books, movies, and TV. I’m not a fan of the idea of publicly reviewing and rating creative stuff, but I like to do it for my own purposes, to help me keep track of what I’ve watched and read, and to record my thoughts so that later I can refresh my memory or revisit these things and revise my opinion. By nature, these platforms are wrapped onto a social media framework which makes the discussion public and turns thoughts into statements, and that bugs me.
On Twitter, facebook and now Bluesky I find myself constantly composing thoughts that are negative and geared toward complaining about aspects of pop culture that bug me. 99% of the time these missives are deleted before they’re posted as I try to make an effort to not share these thoughts publicly. Again, as much as I’d like to start a conversation with online friends, it’s hard for these thoughts to not become statements and I will be the first person to say that my opinions are irrelevant to the public discourse. I need to be better. Better at starting these conversations in private, because the public forum can so easily and quickly be co-opted where statements and thoughts lose all of their context. They become binary, good and evil, or more often good versus evil. These things become fights, they divide us, and the environment of this strife encourages us to make judgments that either lionize or demonize. There’s very little space to offer compassion or to talk about redemption. The grey of life is ignored.
A specific area where I’m super guilty of this is in discussing the comic book work of Rob Liefeld. I grew up reading the X-Men, New Mutants, and X-Factor, all the Marvel Merry Mutant books of the late 80s and early 90s. Rob was a superstar artist of that era, taking over the New Mutants towards the end of that book and transitioning it to X-Force. And I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t appreciate a lot of what he was doing and for decades afterward, he’s been the butt of many jokes between my friends and me. The ribbing we gave him in private is between me and my friends and it was never meant to reach his ears and hurt him specifically. I’d never entertain the idea of writing him or Marvel a letter, or approaching him at a convention to share my thoughts, because that would be gross.
But that didn’t stop me from tweeting out stuff, sharing images of his artwork and tearing it apart, mocking his eccentricities in storytelling or draftsmanship. I never imagined he was paying attention, and he most assuredly wasn’t. But by making it public, the opportunity for these thoughts to reach him is there. I’ve had a few tweets go viral, and if one of my dumb Rob Liefeld tweets had hit, well, that would have made me feel like the world’s biggest turd.
Rob shared a video in the wake of Ed’s death that again, hit me very hard. His takeaway is that we need to be better. And we do.
I need to be better.
Am I saying I’m not supposed to have these thoughts or express them? No. But there’s a simple equation for deciding what I should and shouldn’t share online. Would I say the thought straight to the person’s face?
In the wake of Ed Piskor’s suicide, my rubbernecking hasn’t subsided. I need to be better. The conversation hanging out there in the public forum is mostly gross. Both sides are making grandiose statements obliterating the humanity of the situation for everyone involved, and again, it breaks my heart.
