Beat to Death: The Ed Piskor "Grooming" Hoax

On Saturday, May 30, 2024, an acquaintance messaged me: “Off topic, but can you believe all that crap going on with Piskor??” I hadn’t heard a word about Ed Piskor—apparently, I was living on the dark side of the moon—even though social media had blown up the Saturday before.

I replied, “What’s going on with Piskor? Hadn’t heard anything.”

[Note: Scroll way down to the bottom for an Addendum, June 25, 2024.]

The acquaintance sent me a link to The Beat article, https://www.comicsbeat.com/multiple-women-accuse-cartoonist-ed-piskor-of-grooming-and-misconduct/ and a screen shot of Jim Rugg’s distancing statement.

“Nope,” I replied. “Hadn’t heard. The end of Kayfabe?!” It was so abrupt.

Seemed so.

I told this acquaintance,

Frankly, I’m sure my views on “grooming” are out of step with current mores, so the less said the better. Like I said to someone not very long ago, when I was seventeen or eighteen or nineteen, I couldn’t find a seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen-year-old female who wasn’t dating a guy at least 35 years of age. It was a different century. Women were looking for an older guy back then who had a job, career, money—they couldn’t wait to get out of their parents’ houses.

That was my hot take, verbatim.

I concluded, “I’m not going to delve into the trials of Ed Piskor, mostly because I don’t have time.”

This was true; that particular Saturday, I was tracking down a package. When Denis Kitchen consigned his underground art collection to Heritage, one piece in particular had struck my eye—a promotional poster design for Megaton Man that I had completely forgotten about and hadn’t seen since I mailed it from Detroit to Wisconsin in the summer of 1984. I was convinced that the art, never used and probably was filed in a drawer by art director Pete Poplaski (who created another poster design from blown-up panels from #1), still belonged to me and had never been returned. After a few cordial emails (astonishing in itself, considering our fraught history), Denis was persuaded this was probably the case, and instructed Heritage to ship the piece back to me.

Unpublished 1984 promotional poster design, remastered 2024.

All morning and afternoon, I was obsessed with tracking the package between the Pittsburgh USPS distribution center and two rural post offices near where I now live. Finally, that afternoon, I picked up the package.

Still, I elaborated to my acquaintance,

But seriously, are young women just not conscious of the fact that they are young women, and that cartoonists are mostly introverts who spend their lives at drawing boards? I mean, just what are the expectations they have going into striking up a correspondence? It makes no sense to me.

And then, I’m a fan but I’m going to bust you. Wow. Just peculiar. You just have to block everybody!

Again, verbatim.

I pushed the Ed Piskor matter out of my mind and digitized the 1984 artwork to post on social media. On Sunday, I decided to digitally remaster the entire thing—it was actually an original drawing with pasted up panels from the 64 pages of slosh I mentioned before, most of which would subsequently appear in issues #3 and #4, along with a Magic Marker color guide on a tissue (tracing paper) overlay. Although the piece is neurotically overworked, I thought it might make a suitable 11" x 17" print for Megaton Man’s fortieth anniversary.

I thought of Ed from time to time and wondered if I should send him a text message of support. I literally thought, “Hang in there”—but under the circumstances, maybe that would have been a poor choice of words.

Besides, since when have I ever insinuated myself into a situation and made it better?!

Still, I had known Ed as a passing acquaintance over the past twenty years, since before he’d broken into comics; he’d said several remarkably nice things about my stuff on the Kayfabe channel in recent years, and the biggest feather in my cap from 2023 was the hour-long interview Ed and Jim conducted with me in the wee hours of the morning last fall. I will always feel bad the cameras couldn’t have run for another hour or two.

To my eternal shame—I will use the phrase a second time—I said nothing. I was paralyzed.

On Monday, April 1, I spent the morning getting a couple guitars restrung down on Carson Street at Pittsburgh Guitar. I had a nice cup of coffee at Starbucks across the street while I entered receipts into my Excel spreadsheet; that afternoon, I got an oil change in the South Hills and enjoyed the most delicious Greek food I’d ever had in Yorgi’s in Steubenville, Ohio.

By the time I drove home, I got another link—Ed Piskor, 41, had passed away.

Just to confess how dense I am, my immediate thought was, “What a coincidence. He was in fine health just a few …”

Perhaps the most euphemistic headline I’d ever read.

At the time, I posted,

The last thing anyone should be doing right now is opining about Ed Piskor or any of the surrounding circumstances. Just meditate on the fact that life is what’s important, not careers. God bless.

Opining—what an asshole. That was sixty days ago. Now is a different moment. Now, I’m all for opining. I’m at that opining stage in my journey to recovery.

Since April 1, I’ve written way too much on Ed Piskor, considering that I never so much as sat down and had a cup of coffee with him—all our face-to-face conversations were standing at comics or arts events.

To this day, I’ve not read the raw screen caps or the texts or Ed’s letter in their entirety.

I’ve only read The Beat article credited to “staff” and the Matt Petras City Paper article announcing the scuttling of the Ed Piskor exhibit by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. And I’ve listened closely to several professional acquaintances in person and through messages on their reactions to the tragedy.

I keep coming back to The Beat article. Mostly because it keeps coming up near the very top every time I Google “Ed Piskor.”

You must have already made a fortune off that article, Heidi.

That article has never sat well with me; there’s always been something off. Even my cursory glance at it that Saturday as I was tracking down my package told me something about it—perhaps everything about it—was wrong.

I’ve since read it several more times, more closely. Although it’s been altered somewhat since April 1, it’s not been substantially corrected or updated. In fact, it’s only been redacted and become more incoherent and incomprehensible. It’s still wrong.

To begin with, the testimony of the two women—neither of whom I’ve ever met or even seen pictures of—as conveyed in the extant article is internally conflicted. One, still addressed by Ed as “Molly” in a screenshot (good job redacting, redactors!), offers excerpts of their exchanges, with her later commentary superimposed. Whether these were the original screenshots posted on Twitter (or rather X; I’m old school) or mashup graphics made by “The Beat Staff” to illustrate the article is unclear. Since I wasn’t paying attention and never saw Molly’s original posts, and don’t know how to begin to track them down (although I’m sure they’re still floating around the internet somewhere), I honestly don’t know.

I defy anyone to extract meaning from these graphics, yet I will offer my overeducated take:

At the top of the first screenshot, Molly describes herself as “a slut for lineart”—a provocative self-designation for an alleged seventeen-year-old, I think you’ll agree. It is unclear what exchange proceeded that; presumably, this is nowhere near the first exchange of messages she had with Ed.

In return, Ed praises her: “Damn, this is incredible work”—presumably, Molly had just posted one of her drawings, although we are not shown it. Then, he asks her whether she is 17 or 18 years of age. Assuming this question has some logical connection to the preceding statement, perhaps Ed is merely impressed with Molly’s artistic development and wants to compare it to his own at around the same age. Molly’s superimposed commentary makes it clear, however, that she wants us to read Ed’s question as a sudden, “pervy” curiosity about whether she could legally consent to engage in sex.

This latter interpretation is doubtful, however, because—as Heidi MacDonald herself assures us in the comments following The Beat article—17 is old enough to consent to sex in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Ed, as a lifelong resident, surely would have known that.

Let me interject that I don’t know for a fact what the legal age of consent is in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and I’ve lived here for more than half my life. Personally, I find it creepy that a woman of about my age—over sixty—knows the legal age of consent in a state where, as far as I know, she does not and has never resided.

A second screencap of Ed and Molly’s undated texts superimposed with Molly’s commentary, presumably from 2024, shows Ed asking, “Drawn anything lately, Nerdy Girl?” It’s not clear how this nickname was arrived at, since it is unclear how much of the intervening conversation has been omitted, but Molly at the time clearly doesn’t object to the sobriquet. She replies, “Just self-indulgent doodling today.” Ed replies, “You’re so fucking good, Molly,” presumably praising her drawing.

Molly’s 2024 commentary superimposed over these messages is rambling and repetitious—it isn’t even clear how it relates in time to the commentary superimposed over the preceding screencap. In any case, she complains of Ed showing off his “secret” current work in progress to her “and gassing me up constantly, basically trying to groom me into whatever the fuck. Saying my art was so good and saying he’d promote my work.”

It would seem that Molly just can’t take a compliment and maybe tends to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I know that I’m constantly showing art that I’m currently working on to whomever I happen to be in communication with, whether friend or relative or total stranger; I’m sure a lot of cartoonists with internet connections are compulsive showoffs, too. It’s no doubt annoying for the recipient. But it’s unclear from the excerpted texts whether Ed is doing more than that.

“Groom me into whatever the fuck”—one would like to know precisely whatever the fuck it was Ed was trying to groom Molly into. Maybe into her own cartooning career?

It is worth noting that Molly’s use of the term “grooming” seems synonymous and interchangeable with “persuading” or “talking into”—as one might groom one’s partner into picking up some groceries on the way home from work, or groom the U.S. Postal Service into delivering the mail, or groom a computer to reboot. It would seem that Molly lives in a universe where everyone and everything has to be groomed into doing something it would otherwise not care to do.

This is a big problem, by the way, when the term grooming could mean everything from simply getting to know someone to coercing them into unwanted sex.

In a third screencap, apparently spliced from two separate screencaps, Ed writes, “Naughty girl. That’s my favorite,” presumably an assessment of a drawing Molly posted that we cannot see. Ed asks, “I feel like you’d be a good partner in crime. You’re not a snitch, are you? If we were to rob some banks you wouldn’t rat me out?” Molly replies, “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’d rather be Raoul Duke or Dr. Gonzo.” Ed replies, “Good girl. You give the correct answers.” Molly replies with a heart emoji.

This may be the most damning exchange, although it’s unclear how much grooming was left to do with a seventeen-year-old who was already a slut for Hunter S. Thompson.

I have to say this is also the most sophisticated exchange; frankly, one has to wonder if somebody is not coaching Molly in her answers.

In the bottom half, presumably following posts of photos of Ed’s apartment, he offers a description: “The last one’s the back bedroom. Has a drawing table in there, too. You can crash there if you ever wander to my side of the state for a few days. And old video games.” Molly replies with another “heart” emoji, adding, “This is one of the most beautiful collections I’ve ever seen.”

Again, shorn of context, it is unclear what the reader is supposed to make of all this. Is this just Ed showing off? Flirting?

Molly’s superimposed commentary, however, makes it clear that as she looks back on her 2020-2021 correspondence with Ed, she regards it as “creepy,” “inappropriate,” aggressively “trying to groom me.”

†††

Perhaps someday an article in The Beat can explain to me the grammatical difference between grooming someone into whatever the fuck and trying to groom someone into whatever the fuck; there doesn’t seem to be any functional distinction.

Molly describes herself as “starstruck”; as having been “young and dumb” and “still both”; as “naïve” and “desperate for attention”; and as “not just some nobody high school girl drawing gore art.” She also concedes, “also having a boyfriend who knew of his work and wanted to push and respond to him did not help.”

My guess is perhaps it was the boyfriend who was the slut for Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s curious to me why Molly feels the need to out Ed Piskor for “trying to groom” her but not the mysterious, manipulative boyfriend who absolutely was grooming her to maintain a pen-pal texting relationship with Ed Piskor she might otherwise not have wanted.

It’s also remarkable that Molly spontaneously confesses that she is the one deceiving Ed Piskor and feigning an interest his work, not the other way around. Who, exactly, is grooming whom?

Molly describes Ed as “famous” and speculates, “I’m just telling you the truth about this person. The truth that a lot of other cartoonists are aware of! Who I know for a fact are aware of: That Ed Piskor likes young girls. And he will try to use his ‘fame’ to get them to Facetime with him, give him some attention, or make them come and stay with him.”

Ed Piskor was a New York Times bestselling author and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist. That’s certainly more “famous” than me; I don’t see the justification for scare quotes.

I’d also be interested to know what “lot of other cartoonists” Molly has in mind. I don’t know of any professional cartoonists who were aware of Ed’s sexual preferences or proclivities at all; presumably Molly is referring to the amateur ‘zine and sketchbook artists who hang around in Portlandia coffeehouses and know everything about the universe one needs to know from their palm-sized glass rectangles.

Molly adds, “I don’t know if this has worked for him.”

This is a major caveat. Molly has exerted a great deal of energy outing Ed Piskor as a groomer of young women—yet she concedes she had no idea whether this has ever worked, on her or any other person.

Good Lord.

The screencaps as presented in The Beat story are a mishmash of cuts-and-pastes without reference to time or even sequence; it is unclear, frankly, whether they were made by Molly and represent her original posts or by “The Beat Staff.”

Molly’s writing overall, as expressed in her commentary, borders on the incoherent; it is sloppy and in dire need of proofreading (I’ve actually compulsively cleaned up the punctuation and spelling here and there), and I daresay the product of an uneducated, immature mind. If the excerpted texts are representative, she seems to have been smarter, more sophisticated, and more witty in high school and the subsequent year while texting Ed than in the last week of March 2024.

As an educator, I seriously wonder whether some trauma or development in Molly’s life can account for both her disjointed commentary and her sudden need to turn on Ed. Did she go to college? Did she switch boyfriends? Is she just frustrated with the lack of progress in her cartooning aspirations? Did she have some spiritual awakening that has caused her to renounce her former life of reading Ed Piskor comics and Hunter S. Thompson gonzo journalism and follow the straight and narrow? One can only hope.

The exchanges with Ed that Molly has chosen to share are highly selective, and far from conclusively damning. Presumably a great deal has been left out of account, including Platonic discussions of comics and art, wet dreams of vintage video games yet to be discovered, and other such summer camp sleeping bag talk. The excerpts convey only Molly’s contemporaneous approval and positive responses (heart emojis and the like) to Ed’s remarks.

Only in the superimposed commentary does Molly reveal her current feelings about Ed, which are flatly contemptuous: “I’m not just some random girl who can draw that he can groom enough to come to Pittsburgh to watch him do his stupid strip he’s doing now” and “take me out to lunch to meet other [Pittsburgh] cartoonists.”

One wonders whom Ed had in mind—me?! Jason Mink?!

Lunching with a bunch of local cartoonists, I agree, would be a fate worse than death.

In fact, back in the ‘teens, well before the pandemic, there used to be a regular monthly meeting of Pittsburgh indy cartoonists (male and female, professional and coffeehouse ‘zine) held at an East End hotdog shop, in broad daylight. I attended several of these. The participants passed around their latest publications and pages from works in progress, gassed one another and tried to groom them into whatever the fuck, and consumed high-calorie, overpriced hotdogs and microbrew beer.

I never heard of Ed attending any of these confabs—he, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli (the Young Lions, I called them) were too busy and successful to hang out with schlubs like Wayno, Mark Zingarelli, Marcel Walker, occasionally Rob Rogers, and myself—let alone bringing along a date who had wandered over from the other side of the state. But, boy, you didn’t want to mix with a rough crowd like that in the middle of the day! There’s no telling what kind of trouble a young, naïve girl could get herself into, even one who’d prepped by reading Piskor and Thompson.

What puzzles me is why this attempted grooming failed to work. An invitation to play with an awesome vintage video game collection, the chance to watch a stupid comic strip being drawn, the opportunity to hang out with local cartoonists whom the world has largely passed by in a post-industrial city—the American dream come true! What’s not to get any young girl creaming in her jeans?!

It is clear that Molly wants the reader to infer the worst from this mishmash. But nowhere is sex even mentioned—I suppose that’s the main clue that what we’re dealing with here is grooming, or attempted grooming. Nowhere does Molly offer anything but affirmative, enthusiastic responses or heart emojis to the texts from her correspondence with Ed. Nowhere does she say, “This creeps me out, Mr. Piskor. I’m really not interested in a sexual relationship. And with all due respect, your latest work is rather lame.”

Perhaps she didn’t know you could say that to someone who, you know, is on YouTube.

Nowhere does she even mention having a boyfriend to Ed, let alone that she thought his work was stupid. Would Ed have objected to a chaperone? Probably not if the boyfriend was into vintage video games and a slut for linework, I’m guessing. But I imagine calling Ed’s work stupid by itself would have been a deal-breaker—a remark like that would have hurt my feelings.

Molly states, “There is no good reason for a grown-ass man calling a young girl naughty.” But I can think of at least one: apparently, this babe-in-the-woods was reading Red Room and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (or at least watching the Johnny Depp movie version) instead of Wuthering Heights or To Kill a Mockingbird or The Outsiders. And she struck up a correspondence with Red Room’s creator. And she draws gore comics. That’s at least three.

This is not to say that Molly is just a random girl who can be groomed into whatever the fuck. But I’m not convinced that Ed thought of her that way, either.

I understand that we are supposed to believe women when they state their truth. I believe Ed and Molly texted each other back and forth—that much is certain. There was certainly an age differential. I’m more appalled at the intellectual disparity, frankly, although maybe the emotional maturity gap between your typical cartoonist and a high schooler is not as great as one might imagine.

From my point of view, the “age-appropriate relationship” is a newfangled concept that only nosy busybodies could possibly get “uptight” about (that’s the way the kids used to talk back in the day). As I wrote above, I would have killed for an age-appropriate relationship when I was in my teens and twenties. But, I’m only showing my age.

I’m not convinced Molly was being groomed for sex, particularly since there was never a concrete plan formulated to meet up and hook up—at a truck stop in Breezewood in the dead of night, in an East End hotdog shop in broad daylight, or Ed’s Munhall studio—even after four years.

There may have been an implicit or explicit interest in a physical or romantic relationship expressed—who can tell, judging from eight exchanges extracted from a yearlong conversation?

The paradox of this selection is that these are presumably the most damning examples culled from a yearlong text exchange. We’re invited to imagine even worse stuff that we’re not being shown. But if there were worse stuff, surely we would be shown it. There can only be better stuff—or at least more innocuous stuff, perhaps exculpatory stuff—we’re not being shown. (I’m confused now.)

That’s the problem with the entire Beat article—we’re told there are even worse examples of Ed’s behavior that we’re not being shown—but we’re supposed to just imagine it. Or whatever the fuck.

Call me old fashioned, but getting to know someone first before hopping into bed seems like due diligence. Frankly, I find the swipe-right, anonymous-hookup world we live in, where antiseptic, transactional sex with someone no more experienced than yourself is the norm, is creepy. But I’m a hopeless romantic.

As someone wrote to me, “If Ed was a groomer, he was the world’s worst groomer.”

Whatever the fuck else Ed was grooming or trying to groom Molly for, I don’t see any reason to regard his praise for her drawings as anything less than sincere. I just can’t imagine Ed needing to lie to anybody on the subject of art or cartooning for any reason.

Ed never gassed anyone on Cartoonist’s Kayfabe or in person or at any show as far as I know, and being asked to believe he did so online to get some nerdy girl to wander over from the other side of the state strikes me as far-fetched.

†††

The Beat article continues: “The screenshotted Instagram Stories began to spread on social media over the weekend, and as people caught up on them more women came forward to share their experiences with Piskor.”

“More women” in this case meaning two. Precisely two. Two more women.

Again, as an old college writing instructor, I have to protest. More women is an exaggeration. In the headline of the story, it’s even worse: “multiple” is an outright lie.

But more on that in a moment.

Another Molly (we know this from other sources; there’s no reason to be coy) writes, “Several people are coming forward with their Ed Piskor stories. At first I shrugged it off because I’ve known he was a creep for a very long time, which some of you already know because I’ve been vocal about it—but recently I learned that one of them was a minor. He was perusing a minor at the same time as me.” The second Molly describes the first Molly as “a literal child.”

It is not clear from The Beat article who these “several people” coming forward with their Ed Piskor stories are; so far, by my count, there is exactly one person who somehow narrowly avoided being groomed to wander over to Pittsburgh, play vintage video games, watch stupid strips being drawn on the drawing board (which, now that I think of it, seems about as quaint as watching Model Ts roll off an assembly line), and meeting local cartoonists. And possibly eating gourmet hotdogs.

If there were other people with damning Ed Piskor stories on social media, I missed it; I find it odd that The Beat would not have also included their damning testimony, since “The Beat Staff” seemed so eager that they replicate, like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

It is clear, however, that this second individual resents Ed’s perusal (pursuit?) of other young women when he should have been focused on perusing (pursuing?) her alone. Also, she notes that she’s been vocal about Ed’s creepiness for some time.

Molly II adds, “Dude is literally a fucking loser that had to resort to making a YouTube channel to pressure small comic shops into bulk buying a bunch of unsellable comics from him that take up space on shelves while he uses false bulk ordering numbers to falsify his success.”

We interrupt our regularly scheduled inquisition for yet another tangential digression: Since April 1, I’ve had the opportunity to ask several retailers about this scheme to leverage Cartoonist Kayfabe to force unsaleable (the correct term) comics down the Direct Market’s throat. Two retailers who also happen to run conventions in the region (and know “multiple” other retailers) both laughed in my face. “How was this even supposed to work?” one said to me. “What would be the consequences of refusing to cooperate? Would some guy come around and break your legs?!”

Jim Turoczy of Eide’s Entertainment in Pittsburgh, a retailer that began some half-century ago, posted publicly on my Facebook page on May 30, 2024: “The only hustle I ever received from Ed was the request for support on the YouTube Kayfabe channel, which was warranted, as Ed and Jim were on top of everything comics. Those who have accused need to step forward with evidence, payoff receipts, names of any and all accomplices, or STFU.”

It would seem that comics retailers in Ed’s own backyard—where he shopped and did signings—could not be induced “into bulk buying a bunch of unsellable comics from him that take up space on shelves while he uses false bulk ordering numbers to falsify his success.” If it didn’t take place in his hometown, where on earth did it happen?

Maybe these particular retailers are too big and urban; I’m picturing Prohibition-era bootleggers forcing rural speakeasies to carry Hip-Hop Family Tree, because everybody knows Dust Bowl sharecroppers can’t get enough Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five while they’re plowing the back forty with their rented mules.

In fact, anyone who knows anything about the business of comics—which Molly II apparently does not—would find her assertion completely preposterous. That The Beat, ostensibly a comics news site covering the business end of comics as well as the creative, could not be bothered to flag such an obviously ludicrous and demonstrably disprovable assertion is beyond me.

Especially since Heidi MacDonald is on a first-name basis with nearly every comics retailer in North America, and had just attended a comics retailer conference in Pittsburgh, I would have to think she would have heard any grapevine buzz of complaints that Ed was strongarming these honest folk into buying cases of Hip-Hop Family Tree and Red Room.

People who know nothing about comics, however, and who may be curious since Ed’s suicide, can still click on the article and take this unchallenged assertion as a fact and conclude, “Comics is a corrupt enterprise—shops being strong-armed by YouTube channels, cartoonist grabbing middle-schoolers off of playgrounds!” I would think more people in comics, including the comics retailing community that Molly II maligns as dupes, would be outraged at this.

But Heidi’s such a lovable person.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

It just may be that The Beat’s lapse is not a lapse at all, but rather evidence of bias and prejudice (as in “prejudging” or “already judged”). If that were the case, it would comport with the article’s use of the term “more women” to mean only two and Molly II’s unchallenged, unsupported assertion of “more people” (“likes young girls”—plural), followed by “one of them was a minor,” “a literal child.”

I may be overly pedantic here, but I think we can use words more rigorously and exactly. Two means two, three means three. A teenager is not “literally a child”—they are literally a teenager; that’s why the word exists. Use the available word when it’s appropriate and don’t substitute words to subliminally convey a more pejorative connotation—that would be Dr. Don’s rule of thumb.

It would seem even more crucial to be exact when considering that a reputation, a career, and ultimately Ed Piskor’s life may be at stake.

But I know Heidi MacDonald would never play fast and loose with language just to sensationalize and get clicks. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Beat article in fact seems so eager to prejudge Ed that it includes the spurious charge that Ed had defended himself from Molly I and Molly II’s social media posts (along with presumably the innumerable hordes that were coming forth with their stories of being groomed into whatever the fuck) by using a “sock puppet” account, an assertion that was only retracted when the sock puppet was shown to have somehow survived Ed’s suicide.

Now we know what it takes to get a retraction on The Beat.

Any student of mine who committed such a blunder in a course assignment would have been referred to the Academic Integrity Council and as far as I’m concerned would have deserved immediate expulsion from whatever university I happened to be adjuncting for.

†††

The Beat article also reminds the reader, “The misconduct allegations are not the first time that Piskor has been the center of controversy. In 2022, a variant cover that referenced Maus for his series Red Room: Trigger Warnings was criticized for mocking the Holocaust (the cover was drawn by [Jim] Rugg). Piskor has also been criticized for using racial slurs including the N-word in the past.”

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve watched enough Law and Order episodes and various spinoffs to know that it’s at this point in the story that some courtroom attorney dyspeptically says, “Objection, your honor—relevance.” Even if it could be proven that Ed was a died-in-the-wool anti-Semite, or racist, or both (instead of a cartoonist with an awareness and reverence for comics history and Art Spiegelman and an avid follower of hip-hop—a genre known to use the N-word lyrically, along with such pejorative terms as “bitch” and “ho”—and maybe even “slut”), it is unclear what this proves in the case of Molly I, let alone the other perused (pursued?) woman, Molly II.

It all strikes me as an effort of the article writers to prejudice the reader against Ed, who was nothing but a sneaky, Jew-hating, African-American-hating creep, with an open invitation to a young woman to come to Pittsburgh and lunch with crummy cartoonists and participate in nerd culture of the most tepid kind—when he should have been perusing (pursuing?) another young woman closer to home.

But the pièce de la resistance is the headline of The Beat article itself: “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct.”

Headlines are usually written last, and after the main body of the article, at least the good ones (although I wouldn’t put it past Heidi to have thought of the headline first, and made the “facts” fit the clickbait). After establishing that two whole women had complaints about Ed—rather, regrets about their own choices in which they appear to have had complete agency, for which they nonetheless blamed Ed—and following those two complainants and their immaculate self-inflation into “more,” The Beat staff felt justified in inflating that even further into “multiple.”

As I said, I taught college writing for more than ten years. If a student had turned in a paper in which two sources had been turned into multiple, I’d have definitely at least flagged it, if not demanded it be stricken. This kind of inflation can have no constructive use. The only logical reason I can come up with for substituting a three-syllable, eight-letter word (multiple) for a one-syllable, three-letter word (two)—while technically not incorrect—is for the eight-letter word’s connotation of “countless,” “endless”—they are coming out of the fucking woodwork and there is no stopping them.

Clearly, the headline wanted to create the immediate impression that innumerable women were coming forward with allegations against Ed Piskor. In the online world, the headline is everything, and this intentional misrepresentation spread like wildfire through the comics world, not only convincing everyone who read it (myself included) that Ed had been getting away with murder for years right under everyone’s noses, but paralyzing even friends with the fear of God (myself included) that they might be implicated were they to stick up for him.

Worked like magic, Heidi! They don’t call you “Ace” for nothing.

In fact, the headline “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct” encompasses not one but three lies: that there were “multiple” women; that their complaints about Ed and/or regrets about their own ostensibly poor choices amounted to “accusations”; and that Ed’s conduct with the first accuser amounted to “grooming” or “attempted grooming” simply because those were the terms she used, whether suitable or not.

To my mind, it is highly debatable whether Molly I even grasped the meaning of the word—but the introduction of the term “misconduct” seems novel to The Beat article.

Do I really have to point out that sexual misconduct is a real thing? Dr. Larry Nassar was convicted after some 265 women gymnasts at Michigan State University and on the U.S. Olympics team accused him of molestation and rape and sentenced to forty years; Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was accused of sexually abusing 52 boys over a fifteen-year period (four charges were subsequently dropped) and sentenced to sixty years in prison; sixty women accused Bill Cosby of drugging and raping them as well as destroying their professional careers and livelihoods in many cases, served prison time, and has paid more than half a million dollars in civil suits. Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose were both expelled from the television news business after extorting sex from subordinates and destroying the careers of several young news producers and others; and more than a dozen women in the film industry accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault, and rape—although the New York Court of Appeals overturned the convictions in April 2024 and ordered a retrial.

These are cases of sexual misconduct of epic proportions. Obviously, more small-scale, run-of-the-mill, routine sexual misconduct occurs in nearly every workplace or anywhere human beings congregate all over the world; still, it should not be tolerated. It should be called out wherever it takes place.

But it is difficult to see the use of the term in The Beat headline as anything other than willfully libelous and defamatory. It is difficult to see how the perusal (pursuit?) of one person while another person demanded to be perused (pursued?) on a one-at-a-time basis can amount to sexual misconduct—it’s a trivialization of the term.

In the case of Ed Piskor, as of this writing, there has been no allegation of rape, molestation, workplace sexual harassment (since there was no workplace and certainly no workplace policy), no online sexual harassment (since Molly I never seems to have objected to sexual innuendo, having been the only party to introduce it herself, let alone any evidence of Ed persisting in using sexual innuendo after being told to stop), and no stalking, even by use of a sock puppet. Nothing concrete in the way of professional career advancement, such as penciling Wonder Woman for example, was ever offered in exchange for sex, and no career retaliation was ever threatened if sex was refused. No sexual misconduct was ever alleged, attempted, or took place.

Molly II also alleges Ed wanted oral sex in exchange for his agent’s phone number. Whether Ed even had an agent is unclear to me; whether an agent would decide to rep an artist, let alone whether a publisher would undertake the risk of publishing a cartoonist’s work solely on the recommendation of Ed Piskor, are open questions.

I don’t think agents make their whereabouts secret. Getting them to do anything for you is the trick; maybe save the oral sex for them; I never thought of that.

(I recall the story of Gene Simmons of Kiss showing up at the MTV studios in New York in the 1980s wearing knee pads, with a tape of his video, asking rhetorically, “Who did I have to [service] to get this thing on the air?”)

The irony is there are more female editors at graphic novel imprints, more gender diversity, more opportunity on every level in the comics industry. There are no gatekeepers—not to shows, not to printers, not to YouTube, not to crowdfunders. The notion that the only path to fame and fortune in comics lay through Ed Piskor’s Munhall “crib” and the insidious Cartoonist Kayfabe Mafia is too pathetically blinkered to contemplate without bursting into tears.

Bottom line, neither Molly I nor Molly II reported any material or career or even psychological damage, or pain and suffering of any sort, inflicted on them by Ed Piskor. Apparently, they just found their interactions with Ed creepy in retrospect. Have they been made whole since April 1? Are they all better now?

And if no actual harm was ever visited upon Molly and Molly, it is unclear how their warnings to others had any urgency or legitimacy. What was this all about?

A more critical reader performing a close reading of the materials presented by The Beat might conclude that these two Mollies came to regret their own past—presumably poor—choices and found it easier to blame Ed rather than themselves. Or perhaps their complaints were really motivated by their own career frustrations and professional resentments.

†††

A third woman, presumably an artist, also reported that Ed had asked her to pose for a charcoal life drawing. This doesn’t even sound like a plausible pick-up line in the worst 1970s episode of a TV sitcom, let alone a serious allegation of grooming or sexual misconduct.

I can hear the mellifluous voice of Ernie Anderson (Google it, kids): “Tonight … Jennifer goes undercover as a nude model on Hart to Hart! Then …fine artists at sea! On … The Looooove Boat!”

That this should count as one of the “multiple accusations” against Ed seems to me like blatant padding.

I’ve actually taught life drawing courses and drawing courses that included sessions with a nude model. As an art school dropout before that, I also attended numerous (multiple) figure drawing classes; Steve Leiber and I used to partake of open-model sessions (that is to say, drawing sessions without an instructor, only someone to time the poses and collected the money and pay the model) on Pittsburgh’s South Side back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.

Once one gets over the initial shock of someone taking off their street clothes and mounting a platform, and a bunch of clothed people standing at easels with vine charcoal and drawing them in poses held for a few minutes or over an hour, one realizes it’s not a terribly sexy or stimulating experience. It’s hard work, and sometimes drudgery. Rare is the model who looks like an Adonis or an Aphrodite; more often, the reliable ones have done it for years and are sagging, middle-aged human beings.

The only young, fit female models I’ve ever seen usually try it as a lark for a short time after breaking up with a controlling husband or boyfriend. In any case, they were contracted and paid for by the school and not contracted by the instructor, and sometimes not even selected by the instructor.

I’ve never even heard of instructor-model hanky-panky. And believe me, I’ve heard of every other form of hanky-panky in academia.

Honestly, I’ve never asked a woman to model nude for me privately; for one thing, as a pick-up line, I don’t think it would work; it would almost elicit a guaranteed rebuff with a stranger in a bar, for example. In any case, before asking anyone to model for me privately, I would at least want to groom them enough by showing them my stupid etchings of whatever the fuck.

I have had women pose nude for me privately; in each case, I was already in a relationship with them, and moreover it was their suggestion. I wish I could say it was a prelude to the hottest sex of my life, but it was probably a lot more mundane than that. Recently, a married woman asked to pose for me, but I’m not into that whole polyamorous scene. That’s just me.

If I’m laying all my cards on the table, I’m mystified that another artist—or even an artsy fan—would find it offensive, outrageous, or even out of the ordinary to be asked to pose nude, especially an established, famous (no scare quotes) artist like Ed Piskor. Does nobody drop out of art school anymore? Does nobody draw the human figure?

Old Man Diatribe #62: Is this younger adult generation just suspicious, wary, and terrified of every encounter with reality outside of their post-pandemic, palm-sized glass rectangles? Could sex with someone even slightly older than you be any worse than sex with your age-appropriate boyfriend who’s only forcing you to communicate with a famous cartoonist? Did the 1960s and the much-vaunted Sexual Revolution never even happen? Did fucking Marv Wolfman wipe that out along with Earth Two?

These are the rhetorical questions I ask myself, if I’m laying all my cards on the table.

If a shoddy, poorly-sourced mess  like “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct” were handed in as a paper for one of my classes, I would give the student an opportunity to drastically revise their work; otherwise, an F.

†††

I’ve known Heidi MacDonald for as long as I’ve known anyone professionally in comics. On Saturday, July 6, 1984 (I had to look it up), Mike Kazaleh and I drove from Detroit to the Ramada O’Hare for the first day of the 1984 Chicago Comicon. Megaton Man #1 had been picked up by Kitchen Sink Press for publication that spring but would not come out yet for another five months; I had only communicated with the company by mail and phone.

I met Denis Kitchen for the first time in person as he was still setting up the booth; the show hadn’t even opened yet. Within five minutes, Jack and Roz Kirby strolled up. I had been in the business for five minutes.

Nobody knew who I was; photocopies of Megaton Man #1 had been circulated, so word was getting around; Don Thompson’s advance review may have already appeared. However, the book was delayed as Denis sought a more accommodating printer—it may have been solicited and canceled, I don’t recall. The delay allowed me all summer to flounder in an effort to come up with a second issue, generating some sixty-four pages of incoherent material—set pieces, flashbacks, dream sequences—some of which I cannibalized or redrew for later issues.

That day, I met Howard Chaykin; that evening, Jim Valentino. I vividly remember meeting Heidi outside the panel room; I knew her name from her badge and her columns in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, if I’m remembering correctly. I want to say she was wearing denim overalls covered in pinback buttons, but it may have only been a denim jacket or vest. In any case, she has long since switched to more professional blazer.

Heidi MacDonald, San Diego Comicon, 1994.

For the next twelve years, I would see Heidi at almost every major convention and distributor trade show, from Chicago to San Diego to Wondercon to Bethesda’s SPX. The number of times I went to dinner in a group that included Larry Marder, Steve Bissette, Scott McCloud and his wife the late Ivy Ratafia, Jim and his then-wife Diane Valentino, Charles Brownstein, Batton Lash and Jackie Estrada, and Jeff Smith and Vijaya Iyer—or some subset or configuration of this default mélange—is beyond count, but invariably it included Heidi. To say nothing of hanging out in the hotel bar, the breakfast buffet, and so on. All told (or tolled), I probably spent more time in the proximity of Heidi MacDonald that almost any fellow artist or professional.

One of the last San Diego Cons I attended, Larry and Heidi announced they were going to hit every afterhours event that evening. For some insane reason, I begged them to tag along. They warned me that it was going to be grueling, running into the wee hours; they doubted I was up to it. I told them I was in.

Needless to say, already jetlagged from the three-hour time difference from where I lived and the West Coast, not to mention the further sleep deprivation and toxification from cigarette and marijuana smoke and alcohol that was not a staple of my metabolic diet since arriving for the retailer trade show before the con, I was not up to it. After visiting an informal post-wedding reception for fellow Eros artist Gilbert Hernandez and Carol Kovinick (where, to my undying shame, I demonstrated the appallingly bad judgment by drawing an Anton Drek scribble in the guest book—I thought Beto was going to punch me, and he’d have been within his rights), I bailed.

While living in California for a brief four-month stint, I would run into Heidi at Fantagraphics parties in Thousand Oaks that included Doug Wildey and Gil Kane and their wives, along with Jack and Roz—all bitching about the animation industry, which had been their lifeboat from the comics industry and brought them to California. I remember speaking to Heidi on the phone while I lived in Van Nuys, where I’d taken over Mike’s old apartment (he moved into the rehabbed garage of Sodi, Bob Clampett’s widow). It was a curious conversation; she asked me how I saw myself in the comic book industry—as a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond.

I was an artist trying to get better; it struck me as odd to think of comics in terms of pecking order and hierarchy rather than as an artform.

Maybe, aside from all those dinners, I didn’t have all that much in common with Heidi.

After the Image and self-publishing boom of the 1990s and the inevitable bust and distributor collapse in 1996, I didn’t see Heidi again until two years ago. In 2022, wandering around the cavernous Baltimore Convention Center, I was completely lost. I saw two older folks ambling toward me; I stopped them and asked for directions. Then, I realized, “Oh, my God. It’s Heidi MacDonald.” The other guy—I think his name was Richard—worked for her.

I didn’t see Heidi again until ComicsPro this past February in Pittsburgh. Jim Turoczy, co-owner of Eide’s Entertainment, got me shoehorned in to promote my upcoming two-volume omnibus, The Complete Megaton Man Universe, from Fantagraphics Underground. In the afternoon, Heidi and I chatted about Ivy, who was killed driving up to East Lansing to attend one of her daughters’ college graduation. I remember several years back in the ‘90s of Scott and Ivy and a stroller—I even ran into them once at the Art Institute of Chicago before a con. I suppose on of this toddlers was earning an advanced degree.

It was a short chat about the old days, and moving.

Ivy Ratafia (1960-2022) with one of her daughters, Dallas Fantasy Fair, 1995.

†††

Unfortunately, The Beat article isn’t a bad piece of college writing; it’s what passes for serious online comic book journalism in 2024.

Digression #1 [reboot edition]: I’ve never had much use for comic book journalism, even in the best of times. When I was eleven years old, I convinced my mom to write a check to Jim Steranko and mailed it off to Reading, Pennsylvania for a copy of The Steranko History of Comics Volume I. It arrived in a big Manila envelope with the Supergraphics logo and some of Jim’s artwork along with the return address. Inside was not only the book (actually, an oversized pamphlet, the enormous significance of which I’ve written about elsewhere) but the “Big Shazam Issue” of Comixscene (#2, February 1973), all about the Fawcett Captain Marvel and his 1973 relaunch at DC by C.C. Beck. (The issue also featured an article about a weird “underground publisher,” Kitchen Sink Press, written by my future Megaton Man and Border Worlds editor Dave Schreiner.)

To my astonishment, the issue also included news about upcoming storylines in Marvel and DC comic books that weren’t even out yet, including the scandalous tidbit that The Amazing Spider-Man would soon see a major character killed off. This would turn out to be Gwen Stacy. I was utterly appalled, not at the news of an impending death—although the death of Gwen Stacy would be the biggest shock of my young life up to that time—but because it was horrifying to think that comic book companies would tell even Jim Steranko, let alone the public, what was going to happen in their upcoming issues before an eleven-year-old like me had a chance to read ‘em myself. That was just not right.

Who would want to know what was going to happen in a story before they read it? Where was the fun in that? It was completely antithetical to the way I believed comics were supposed to work—I wanted to bike up to Greene’s Pharmacy, pay my twenty cents, and read the comic myself and be surprised, not be told what was going to happen beforehand. I wanted that “Continued Next Issue” thrill—even though, nine times out of ten, I somehow missed the next issue. But if I caught it, I wanted it to be a surprise. (Gary Groth, who began work at Supergraphics later that same year, reports that Steranko likely transcribed press releases verbatim. But still.)

Now, everything has to have a spoiler alert. We shouldn’t even have spoilers. Ever!!

I’ve never had much use for comic book journalism since. But at least Don and Maggie Thompson never ran a story that destroyed a cartoonist’s career and subsequently led to their suicide. Let alone such a shoddy, shabby, incoherently and poorly sourced story that included such extraneous, misleading, and false allegations of sock puppets, preposterous schemes to inflate print runs through YouTube intimidation, threats of boring hotdog lunches with local has-beens, completely irrelevant rumors of anti-Semitism and racism, and other insults to the intelligence as I’ve examined above.

One need look no further than the timeline of events to see where The Beat article fit into the bottom-feeding food chain and sequence of events that ultimately destroyed Ed’s career. On Saturday, the Mollies went at it on social media; on Sunday, The Beat had to be already laying out such a graphically complex if logically muddled story; by Monday morning, May 25, “Multiple … misconduct” had to be queued up and ready to post.

Ed couldn’t have possibly been given more than an hour or forty-five minutes to respond, if that.

No credible news organization would have ever run such a half-assed, second- and third-hand, rumor- and innuendo-filled, hot, steaming pile of shit and called it news, let alone journalism. Indeed, no legitimate news organization ran the story until The Beat’s POS had its effect in the world: the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust announcing the closure of its exhibit of Hip-Hop Family Tree original art in its 707 gallery in the downtown Cultural District.

Sop to all you conspiracy theorists: And isn’t it interesting that the first comment, timestamped half an hour after The Beat story appeared, by someone named “NO,” who, like Molly II, claimed to have been agitating about Ed’s creepiness for a year, reminding everyone that he had a show about to open in Pittsburgh?

This was immediately followed by Matt Petras’ even more fourth-hand article in The Pittsburgh City Paper, our illustrious local alternative weekly. An acquaintance of mine, a longtime daily newspaper veteran, mentioned that the once-illustrious CP’s coverage of the Ed Piskor story is not held in particularly high esteem amongst his journalistic colleagues.*

This no doubt fed the local TV station that ambushed Ed Piskor’s parents at their home with cameras, microphones, and hostile “gotcha” questions.

Even if a more bottom-feeding “news” sites than The Beat (and frankly, it’s difficult for me to imagine a more bottom-feeding news site than The Beat) had been beating the drum (no pun intended—I’ll tell you whenever a pun is intended) over Ed Piskor before The Beat got to it doesn’t make The Beat any less of a bottom-feeder. And the argument that somebody else would have “broken” the story eventually is no excuse for The Beat to have done so.

I would argue that the story wasn’t so much broken as invented out of whole cloth, and that The Beat is not a news site at all, but a gossip site—honed to deliver clickbait and garner ad revenue for sensationalistic coverage of unedifying bullshit that really is nobody’s business but the participants involved.

In particular, the headline “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct” is a calculated, unsupportable, intentional defamation and libel of Ed Piskor, but of the whole comic book industry and every professional cartoonist and career participant in it.

But Heidi’s so doggone loveable.

I’m not a lawyer, but if defamation and libel, with actual malice and the whole bit, apply to The Beat story, then these terms exist in the English language with no practical application. They should be stricken from the dictionary as utterly worthless and merely taking up space.

Like all those unsold, bulk-bought Ed Piskor comics.

The article is credited to “The Beat Staff,” described at the end of the article in the following way: “The Beat Staff is an elite group of trained ninjas.”

Cool.

Like assassins.

And apt. Very apt. All too apt.

This seems to be another instance of The Beat’s problem with simple mathematics: One or two or three equals “more” or “multiple” or innumerable; Heidi MacDonald equals “The Beat Staff.”

It’s obvious that Heidi is the primary author of the article since she is the only Beat staffer to defend the article immediately after in the comments. She’s even the voice of evenhanded reason, proclaiming, “Piskor did nothing illegal.”

This might have been a nice tidbit to underscore in the actual article.

For good measure, she adds, “The age of consent is 16 in Pennsylvania.”

Personally, I find it creepy that a woman about my age (over sixty) knows the age of consent in a commonwealth which, to my knowledge, she does not and has never resided. I’ve lived here more than half my life, even taught students of that age, and I’ve never thought to look it up. But I’ll take her word for it.

Editorializing, Heidi then lectures us, “the lesson is to not groom a young woman by inviting her to come stay in your house.”

You forgot playing vintage video games, watching stupid comics strips come off the drawing board, and meeting local has-been Pittsburgh cartoonists. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, Heidi!

“What he did do is violate community standards,” Heidi extolls. “And the community is judging him.

This would make sense if the article had been reporting on how “the community” was expressing their approbation of Ed’s behavior—by all accounts like a crazed online mob of piranhas (Steve Bissette’s term) thrown red meat. As it happens, however, it seems a disingenuous retcon justification for an article that confirmed that judgment—indeed, validated and consecrated the mob’s rush to judgment—and contributed to the hysteria that destroyed Ed’s career in a matter of hours.

Heidi warns, “I will leave up the [comments] that seem more genuine.” That seem more genuine? How can she tell, when she can’t discern a sock puppet from a cartoonist unless the sock puppet literally outlives the demise of the cartoonist?

Surely, this is the same omniscient clairvoyance that “The Beat Staff” used to compose the article from incoherent, incomprehensible, conflicted and conflicting elements in the first place. Surely, this is how Heidi earned her nickname, “Ace.”

“But engage in any Edgelord name-calling and you get removed.”

Wow. Getting removed from the comments section of a shabby, bottom-feeding comics gossip site—Heaven forbid.

It’s at this point that I’ve led the reader to expect the “big reveal,” wherein I express my sadness that my old acquaintance of forty years has made herself part of the garbage in-garbage out gossip food chain that destroyed Ed’s career. That I express disappointment that this is the business model and brand of The Beat, that this is the way my ol’ convention pal makes her living these days.

That the single most noteworthy accomplishment in her career is her involvement in the death of Ed Piskor.

I’ve already done that in my satire. Why beat a dead horse? (No pun.)

Besides, I’m not really saddened or surprised or disappointed that this is the brand and business model of The Beat and Heidi MacDonald. History has afforded her the power to weaponize and monetize at the same time any gripe or complaint or feeling of discomfort that can be sexed up into a MeToo narrative, whether substantial or substantiated or not. Girl’s gotta eat.

I only wish Heidi’s cynicism and nihilism had not progressed to the point where her only mission in life is to destroy the career of one of our best cartoonists for fun and profit.

With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes—and this is the most wantonly irresponsible and misguided exercise of power I’ve ever witnessed at so close a range.

I assume Heidi is a true believer. In which case, let her hold teach-ins at major shows on the proper decorum between professionals and fans; let her develop non-fraternization policies for the entire Godforsaken comic book industry, or whatever’s left of it. Let The Beat become the de facto Human Resources department of all our workplaces, including convention trade room floors, executive suites, art galleries, bespoke hotdog eateries, and our back bedrooms.

The Beat has already assumed this role in our “community”—and to such beneficent results. We should all send a check for $50 to The Beat staff of elite, trained ninjas so they can perform police background checks; it was mandatory at all the colleges I’ve taught, and actually quite painless. At least then maybe they’d know what the fuck they were talking about.

The real risk, by the way, is not that “Multiple … misconduct” resulted in such a disastrous, disproportionate outcome, but that the next time—when real grooming and sexual misconduct occurs—it will be overlooked or discounted, because “The Beat Staff” is a bunch of irresponsible, fucking shitheads.

†††

I know better than to appeal to Heidi’s sense of fairness or justice, let alone sentiment for “old time’s sake,” or to express my heartbreak for sullying my fond memories of the 80s and 90s. But really, Heidi, is that all you picked up from hanging out with Larry, Scott, Val, Ivy?

I am reminded of the Peter Bogdanovich movie Saint Jack, in which Ben Gazzara plays the owner of a brothel in Singapore. When the CIA taps him to entrap a visiting U.S. politician with a penchant for young boys by photographing the encounter, Ben says, “I don’t touch shit with gloves on.” He takes the incriminating photographs, but in the end has the integrity to throw them in the river.

One could only wish that The Beat had such high ethical standards, or just plain common sense. Instead, I’m tempted to say, “The Beat Staff” all have dried crap under their fingernails, along with dried blood. Tempted, but that would be a cheap shot. I’m sure their fingernails are all very well groomed (pun intended).

Not that Heidi could care less what I think; I’m sure she has a tougher skin than that. Besides, I’ve always had the suspicion she regarded me as stupid.

I will say this, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, take down this wall” line in Berlin:

Heidi, take down that headline.

For the love of God, Heidi, I repeat: Take down that defamatory, libelous, fucking piece of shit headline, “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct.” It’s wrong, it’s always been wrong, and it’s beneath you. It was an exaggeration and a confabulation and an absolute lie when you composed it, and you know it.

Not that it will bring back Ed. But at this point, it would be a nice gesture.

You can’t, you mustn’t leave it hanging out there forever.

_________
*In fairness to Petras, whom I’ve never met, his article is not completely fourth-hand; he seems to have done his own doom-scrolling of social media. He excerpts this gem from Molly I that doesn’t appear in The Beat: “I’m just trying to keep other highschool girls safe from feeling like they need to be considering or rather fucking manipulated into having sex with creepy older men because they have power over them.” This is another libel of the comics industry, as well as ageist hate speech. We all want a safe industry and hobby and artform. Nobody has any power over you that you didn’t give to them.

_________
Addendum-June 25, 2024: Ninety days ago, we were led to believe that more women would be forthcoming with even more terrible allegations against Ed. Molly I was convinced that “lots of other cartoonists” knew that Ed was into “really young girls” (although she knew of no one who actually succumbed to his overtures), and Molly II posted, “I ask that you be supportive and kind [to] all of the women [who] come forward in the coming weeks.” The Beat article was written with the assured expectation that more and worse accusations were in the offing.

In the three months since, a woman who met Ed on a dating attested to a long, platonic friendship online after she made it clear she wasn’t interested in romance since 2014, when she was twenty and he was about thirty (not an unheard-of age differential even in contemporary human history in any case). And she even identified another verifiable woman who could attest that Ed was a harmless nerd.

The pejorative allegations made against Ed amount to a “high school girl” forced by her Ed-obsessed boyfriend to carry on a text correspondence with the cartoonist for a year as the boyfriend’s surrogate; a second woman (now in her late twenties?) who had some kind of consensual relationship with Ed for two years who apparently felt a bit jilted and vengeful; and a third woman who was insulted by being asked to pose for a life drawing—when other women, and I know a few, would have thought it an honor.

These complaints of “creepiness” are insufficient to support even one count of “attempted grooming” (supposing that to be a thing), let alone to justify a purported news story proclaiming Ed Piskor already guilty of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, or even accused of such (see above).

That such complaints relied heavily on the implied promise of more and worse revelations to come for their virality was perhaps the first clue they were flimsy and threadbare on their lonesome to begin with. Demonstrably false accusations such as retailer shakedowns and sock-puppet accounts and the reminder of an aborted cover retracted by the publisher for taste had to be enlisted just to give the article some padding, like a badly-written book report that had fallen woefully short of substance.

Did the Mollies and Heidi know of such women? Were such multitudes hypothetical, fictitious, purely speculative? Were they merely hoped for?

The word “hoax” inescapably comes to mind.

Whether hoax is the apropos term depends largely on whether the intentions of the individuals who put out this bogus spliced-together narrative can ever be discerned.

Clearly, there is some truth to the story—Ed, when he was alive, actually communicated with other human beings. But did we get the whole truth? I think not. And retailer shakedowns, sock-puppet accounts, and irrelevant insinuations regarding Maus tribute covers are sufficient to void the notion of nothing but.

Kind of like the notions of libel and defamation—but I suppose by now you know what I think.

Clearly, The Beat was rooting for more bodies to turn up in the rubble; presumably, no one is more disappointed at the apparent paucity of Ed victims than one Heidi MacDonald. But do we really want our Eisner Award-winning journalists so flagrantly banking on worse news to come?

I think ol’ Will might want his trophy back.

At this point, even if more damning latter-day evidence and testimony against Ed were to materialize, it would not retroactively justify the irresponsibility, callousness, and unbridled prejudice demonstrated by The Beat “staff.” Nothing ever could.

A responsible, evenhanded account of the online furor in the last week of March could have been written—I hope will yet be written. Such an account might have still been unflattering to Ed—as the private details of anyone’s personal life, betrayed and taken out of context and blasted across the internet, might appear—but it would have also pointed out the insufficient cause for such a furor at the time. It would have (Heaven forbid!) interrogated the accusers at least as equally as the accused, or simply pointed out the curious omissions, lapses, inadvertent confessions, and outright falsehoods in their own, poorly-written and often incoherent testimony.

The story might have been subjected to at least as much scrutiny, in other words, as a logic-challenged Bill Mantlo plot for a ’70s Marvel Team-Up.

Most likely, it would have staunched the outrage and given the “community” a moment to reflect rather than simply affirm the flash judgment of the mob.

I disagree vehemently with those who argue that this is too much to expect from a communication medium.
_________

Ed and Life Drawing | Remembrances of Ed | Ed: Socrates’ Sockpuppet | Fond of Ed

Ha ha. Funny.