Ed Piskor
I briefly weigh in on the comics industry with a bunch of other creators at The Comics Beat.
Ed Piskor and I at The Brooklyn Book Fair 2018.
I also wrote about cartoonist Ed Piskor on The Comics Beat's In Memoriam Person of the Year 2024:
"Ed Piskor's death was a paradigm shift for comix and social media ethics.
I spoke to Ed for over 42-minutes, a day or so before he died. He told me lots of personal stuff but I did NOT think he was going to take his own life. It wasn't the non-criminal accusations that hurt him bad. It was the betrayal of his friends, peers and fans. It was the perfect storm of losing his art show, his new book contract, and local news filming his family. He went from hometown hero to hometown monster within days and felt like he couldn't go back home. The only red flag that worried me was that he'd driven to a hotel outside of his home state. I was going to ask him if he wanted to drive to NYC and crash my Brooklyn studio but he was already dead when I was making that second phone call.
This is no longer about Ed who, unfortunately, seemed to assign his identity to social media and it killed him. "Don't believe the hype." It's about how people conduct themselves online. It's about context and redemption. Society needs to learn from this. But I doubt it will. Humanity's inhumanity to human beings is tragic and untenable."
You can read other people's thoughts HERE.