The Death of Socrates and What We Athenians Should Do About It

One argument that will surely trigger me in 2024 and beyond goes something like: “For all we know, Ed suffered from depression and was already suicidal.” If you have the temerity or foolishness to run this notion past this 62-year-old cartoonist, you had best be on the other side of the table and prepared to run like hell and disappear into the crowd when you do so. And make sure somebody’s ready to capture all this on their smartphone, too—the video will surely go viral.

Maybe you need to tell yourself you would not have done what Ed did—that you’ve suffered life’s ups and downs, seen hardship and calamity, experience loss of job or money or social status, and you made a different choice. Good for you. Keep telling yourself that. But don’t try it on me. To my ear, it sounds indistinguishable from blaming the victim—and Ed was the only victim to suffer material harm that I can see—and also minimizes the calamity that was cruelly and intentionally inflicted on him (not by some abstract “cancel culture” but by several individuals we can name).

For sure, Ed had issues—Christ, any cartoonist worth the paper their work is printed on has issues. Just look at Red Room, for Chrissakes. But he was working them out, as are we all, hopefully. But then that form of self-therapy was abruptly taken from him. (I’m suddenly thinking of Gene Wilder in The Producers screaming, “My blankie! Where is my blankie?!”—sorry, that’s the way my minds works.)

Several people have noted that Ed’s last words were particularly lucid and well-reasoned; the only problem was the resolution. But there was no doubt in his mind that his career in comics was over—not only because the blows inflicted on him were outlandish and unfair and debilitating and bankrupting, but because he no longer wanted to be a part comics at all. The dream he loved had died.

Ancillary to the “For all we know” line of reasoning is the assertion that what really hurt Ed was the loss of professional stature, and that the loss of a gallery show and book deal in the final days of March 2024 were only “contributing factors.” This is bullshit. If I’d been busting my ass for twenty years and was looking forward to a major mid-career retrospective in the cultural center of my hometown, where all my family and friends would be in attendance, and a $75,000 advance book deal was in the offing—in an era were revenue from print publishing is almost non-existent—and those two things were maliciously snatched from me at the eleventh hour, I’d sure as hell be a lot more than crestfallen; I might be standing on the Sixth Street Bridge, staring into the abyss. (Note: The plunge from the Sixth Street Bridge, from the pedestrian walkway, would probably only get you wet.)

Ed said so himself: “Now it’s all gone. Art show evaporated. Was about to sign a $75k deal for Switchblade Shorties with Abrams …” Those were the two material blows that were topmost in Ed’s mind. Everything else was secondary, or at least reversible: unfriends could refriend, YouTube channels could return (for all intents and purposes, they have). Professional relationships could have been mended.

But fine art gallery shows and major-imprint book deals don’t come along every six weeks, and anybody who thinks so clearly has come nowhere near the world of gallery fine art or publishing. Personally, I could live without the warm, collegial respect of Evan Dorkin—he’s been an asshole as long as I’ve known him. But the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Abrams reneged on their agreements with Ed without cause. I’m not a contract lawyer but I’d love to see them run out of business.

So, if you disagree, you’re not arguing with me; you’re arguing with Ed.

Speaking only for myself, I think we should absolutely take Ed at his word. He composed the one truthful document relating at all to this tragedy. Others had various agendas—breaking into comics, resentment for not being able to break into comics, and the sheer profitability of exaggerating what I so artfully termed “mean girl cafeteria gossip” (see my 2-page strip, below) into willfully malicious, defamatory, libelous clickbait.

The headline “Multiple women accuse cartoonist Ed Piskor of grooming and misconduct” was knowingly false at the time it was composed by headline writers—not even Ed’s primary accusers; yet (as of this writing) continues to reap massive clicks and ad revenue for a so-called comics “news” site. More apt would have been “Three individuals with axes to grind—that’s all we could scrounge up—take pot-shots at a cartoonist who’s just about make Shaft’s Big Score.” That those potshots got lucky and Shaft never made the Big Score—well (shrug of the shoulders), who’s fault is that? (And if the three individuals’ lives are also ruined—another shrug.)

Ed “did nothing illegal. […] What he did do is violate community standards. And the community is judging him.” So proclaims the Omniscient Oracle with the shrugging shoulders who, presumably, crafted the very headline. Nothing like editorializing in the comments section of your own “objective” article!

I’ve already depicted Ed as Jesus Christ, so I’m not going draw him again as another wrongfully-accused historical figure. But lately, I’ve been thinking a more apt analogy is Socrates, and philosopher who was put to death in 399 bc. His Athenian community found him guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth—nothing illegal, strictly speaking, but presumably violating community standards in the worst way.

Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), The Death of Socrates, 1787. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. You’ll hafta imagine your own caricature of Ed wearing a Pirates cap superimposed over the central figure.

By all accounts, Sokrates or Σωκράτης (spelled with a “k” if you’re a purist) was perfectly lucid in his final hours, never moreso. He even held forth for hours on numerous subjects with his students, all duly recorded in The Phaedo—Plato functioning as Socrate’s sockpuppet, if you will—since Socrates never wrote anything down (Socrates had this in common with those other influential teachers Jesus and Buddha, whose students chronicled their respective traditional sayings).

If Plato is anyone to go by, Socrates was not “already suicidal” or “suffering from depression” when he acceded to the will of his community and decided to end his life, as they had sentenced him. He had spent decades teaching his philosophy to the youth of Athens and now that was all being taken away from him. He’d had his say. He was also pretty sick and tired, one can only assume, of a community that could so unfairly judge him. Athens didn’t want Socrates and Socrates didn’t want Athens—the feelings were mutual.

So, he drank the hemlock.

(For what it’s worth, Plato and later his pupil Aristotle both got out of Athens for fear of their lives. The latter quipped that this was to prevent the city from committing another crime against philosophy.)

This is not to glorify or romanticize what Ed did, let alone to have wished for the outcome. But I can’t argue with Socrates, and I don’t have the heart to blame Ed in any way.

Maybe you do. If so, please, keep it to yourself (see above).

I know a number of cartoonists of my generation who gave up on comics for various reasons after several booms and busts, underemployment, career frustration, and life distractions. To generalize, life is too short, and we moved onto other pursuits.

I can get specific about my own career—and I will, at a later date—but suffice it to say, when I dropped out of comics after the mid-‘90s, the writing had been on the wall for a while. After it was clear that Fiasco Comics and Bizarre Heroes could proceed no further, I transitioned to an online web comic for a while, then advertising in the local market, then part-time bookseller at a Borders Books and Music in the North Hills of Pittsburgh. Finally, after 9/11 and a year of soul-searching, I enrolled in the Community College of Allegheny County. Long story short, I earned a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in art and architectural history in 2013.

The point is, I and others who felt exiled from the industry after the Image-and-self-publishing heyday had the luxury of time to figure out exactly what our next act might be after comics. After years of trial and error, most of us landed on our feet, finding some compromise between day job and other life pursuits and a small if nostalgic amount of time at the ol’ drawing board. Me, I’ve been lucky enough to actually wander back into cartooning and shows—I still can’t bring myself to use the term “comics,” whatever that might mean.

If I’d had the opportunity, I might have suggested to Ed to go back to school and study philosophy—I think he would have been damn good at it. Or move to a monastery in Tibet or something.

Unfortunately, Ed’s world collapsed in a matter of hours, not years. He had no time to think straight (or maybe he did). He had no other pursuits. Comics was his life.

Please note that I’m not comparing myself to Ed or what I went through to what Ed went through—the sexual humiliation and embarrassment, for one thing—I can’t make the comparison, which is why I can’t bring myself to judge Ed.

Just yesterday someone conveyed to me the assurance that the Omniscient Oracle felt “really awful” about what happened to Ed—as distinct from remorse or guilt or shame or culpability—and expressed the wan hope that maybe the gossip mongers and clickbaiters will think twice about how they cover such stories in the future.

Why in the world would they do that?! After so vastly enriching themselves on this debacle? In my experience, people don’t suddenly grow a moral conscience after forty years in the comics industry (even if they can weep over the late Ivy Ratafia). Sorry, I don’t expect that to happen magically, all by itself.

This, like the “already” line of reasoning, this is inventing a scenario for which there is absolutely no justification whatsoever. There is no indication that Ed was anything other than a productive cartoonist when he was ambushed and waylaid, and there is no reason to expect the gossip site that ambushed and waylaid Ed and convinced the industry that “multiple” accusers—and countless more waiting in the wings—had already convicted Ed will temper their behavior in the future. This is all just science fiction. In fact, you can expect oracular business as usual, unchecked and—I fully expect—even more brazen in the future.

As for those of us who remain in Athens, we face a choice. For the first time, toxic fandom—fueled by unprincipled gossip sites—poses an existential threat to the art form of cartooning. And one doesn’t have to be depressive or suicidal or even in a bad mood previously to see that. We can either let the toxic fans and the omniscient oracles commit more crimes against cartooning. Or, like Plato and Aristotle, we can skip town—personally, it feels like I’ve already done that. I’m not about to go away quietly again.

Or, we can rise up against the toxic fans and the Omniscient Oracles and show them the door, block them, cut off their oxygen (they are starved for attention), boycott advertisers on their sites. I’m for any and all that. They are not about art and creativity and life and never have been, as Ed was—they are about malice, revenge, clicks, and ad revenue, and always have been. Their “Multiple … misconduct” headline continues to be an outrage and an intentional defamation of Ed and the artform he loved.

Banishment, exile, and shunning in polite company all seem like the appropriate response.

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Note: Certain self-styled cultural critics took me to task in 2023 for including an exhaustive appendix in the back of X-Amount of Comics: The 1963 (WhenElse?!) Annual, pointing out that if I have to explain the humor, maybe I’m not very good at humor. That’s a fair point, assuming that X-Amount was merely aspiring to entertain; however, sometimes satire is not supposed to be funny, but rather polemical. One could regard this text as an explication of my recent two-page tribute to Ed and my comix beat-up satire—ostensibly humorous pieces that can’t stand on their own—and one would be right. I’m not trying to be funny; I’m trying to get my point across.

This is my two-page tribute. Click on it for a larger image—it’s a knee-slapper.

Read my latest polemical satire here.

“Like comedian Mort Sahl and his obsession with the JFK assassination in later years, funnyman Dandy Don has completely lost his sense of humor of late (a PhD will do that to ya); luckily, they’ll be reprinting his older, funnier Megaton Man stuff later this year. But boy, what a grouch!”—The Toxic Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom.

Ed Piskor and Life Drawing | Remembrances of Ed Piskor