The Love of Ed Piskor's Life (Besides Comics)

The love of Ed Piskor’s life (besides comics) seems to have been a research scientist who taught at one of Pittsburgh’s many fine universities. Ed was even known to have ditched the Pirates cap and Public Enemy jersey and actually don a suit and tie for their cultural evenings on the town, I am told. In his final message, Ed wrote of her:

My greatest relationship began at the end of Covid thanks to meeting on Instagram. A rocky but amazing 3-year relationship with someone who taught me true love. That said, I’m so glad we broke things off when we did so that she doesn’t get any slack. She’s way better off. Hope you’re well, Clam. I never stopped loving you. This all happened before I knew you.

Perhaps the greatest injustice in this entire tragedy that Ed is linked not to this beautiful and brilliant (and age-appropriate) woman, as she has been described to me, but to several women peripheral to comics who couldn’t hope to hold a candle to her in terms of education, intellectual level, or much else. (I happen to have been married to a PhD in the sciences myself, since divorced.)

T-shirt design (still available!)

Before going any further, you’ll want to have read my relatively concise (4000-word) synopsis of what I call the Ed Piskor grooming hoax, and possibly my more long-winded (10,000-word) account, which offers direct quotations and reference sources. I don’t want anyone accusing me of not having done my homework.

Five months after we lost a brilliant cartooning mind and historian of comics, still no legitimate journalistic organization has reported on this tragedy, dispelling the false testimony that wantonly destroyed Ed Piskor’s career, or reported on the self-hating toxic fandom that was willing to believe the worst about someone of whom they should have been most proud.

Ed Piskor never harmed anyone; this is an indisputable fact. No one ever reported being molested, assaulted, raped, sexually harassed in the workplace or online, promised tangible career advancement such as a job or promotion in exchange for sex, threatened with career reprisals for withholding sex, or any other concrete injury by Ed Piskor. No one. Ever.

It is not widely known that Matt Petras, who wrote The City Paper account of the closing of Ed’s 707 Gallery exhibition (sponsored by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust—one should never forget their ass-covering cowardice and failure to honor their agreement and support the arts), was a follower of Molly Wright, Ed’s principal accuser, on LinkedIn at the time he wrote the article; this piece broke the news in the local Pittsburgh media market and no doubt unleashed a local TV station on Ed’s elderly parents. Of Petras, Ed wrote succinctly:

Matt P at the [Pittsburgh] City Paper, you know what you did to skew your narrative. Fuck you.

Petras studied journalism at Point Park University from 2014 to 2018; Molly Wright majored in animation at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh at the same time, from 2014 to 2018. Through a longstanding partnership, AIP students took academic classes required for their associate’s and bachelor’s degrees at Point Park. (It is not clear whether Wright earned a degree prior to the school filing for bankruptcy and closing in 2019.)

I taught at the for-profit Art Institute of Pittsburgh from 1996 to 1997. While I came across a small number of talented students during my time there, I was informed by an administrator that 90% of the student body was composed of the lowest 10% of their respective high school graduating classes. I believe it. For-profit schools have been the subject of much legal and governmental scrutiny in recent decades as fleecing operations and diploma mills with low career placement, and AIP enjoyed a reputation as one of the worst in the business.

If Petras and Wright were not only affiliated on LinkedIn but college friends, this should have been disclosed in The City Paper story, as it is a clear conflict of interest—I am told this by someone who knows a great deal more on the subject of journalistic ethics than I. (Wright was identified by name in the original posting of the article.) In fact, the story should have been assigned to almost anyone else who would have not held such an obvious bias.

Petras’ profile on LinkedIn has disappeared since I last viewed it just two days ago. LinkedIn, for those who don’t know, allow users to view who has recently viewed their profile. All that I am able to find now is a Google link to a non-existent page.

As for Wright, I have already questioned in a previous blog post what use an animator—who never seems to have cartooned a single comic strip or page of sequential art in her life or developed any characters, storyline, or IP that anyone is aware of—could have for the phone number to Ed’s literary agent in New York—a busy professional who reps mystery prose novelists with finished manuscripts and graphic novelists with tangible projects looking for publishers, not beginners and wannabes looking for attention. (It would be like me needing a chauffeur for my non-existent limousine.) I’ve yet to receive any explanation, plausible or otherwise, to my query.

A source close to Ed Piskor publicly revealed that Wright had posted a message following Ed’s death that was subsequently removed (although a screenshot purportedly exists) in which Wright claimed “she got what she wanted,” presumably a reference to the destruction of Ed’s career and ultimate suicide. If this is true, it would comport with Wright’s own statement:

Ed and I’s exchanges were short lived, only about two or so years. We would check on one another every couple months. It was clear he had grown afraid of me. I’ve warned several people over the years about him …

Taken together, this would suggest a long campaign to destroy Ed’s career that finally succeeded all to spectacularly. (And yes, I would be afraid, too—like Michael Douglas of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.)

Among those Wright warned “over the years” may very well have been Molly Dwyer, the high-school senior who initially thought her year-long text conversation with Ed was “cool.” In the fewer that eighty words Dwyer extracted from the conversation, Ed seems to only praise Dwyer’s work, which he claimed “crushes me at that [same] age” (which was seventeen at the time).

Dwyer revealed that her boyfriend urged her to carry on the conversation with Ed beyond what she herself was inclined to do, until she finally broke free of this influence (grooming?) and stopped of her own accord. Dwyer states that she was persuaded to take another look at the texts years later after communicating with “lots of other cartoonists”—cartoonists who very likely were adjacent to Wright, and perhaps none other than Wright herself.

In any case, as a result, Dwyer became retrospectively convinced that Ed couldn’t have been sincerely praising her work but must have had an ulterior, if unstated, sexual motive.

What is curious is that Dwyer consistently stops short of explicitly claiming she thought Ed wanted to have sex with her. Instead, Dwyer repeatedly hedges her bets by claiming, “I felt like he was trying to groom me” (her emphasis) and “groom [me] into whatever the fuck”—but never seeming able to bring herself to state exactly “whatever the fuck” could have been.

It’s almost as if Dwyer can’t quite believe Ed could have really been romantically or sexually interested in her, despite what she had been induced to believe by others. (Yes, this is both literary close-reading and pseudo-dimebook Freudian analysis; bite me.)

Ed wrote,

And it wasn’t even with sex in mind but simply saying that there’s a bed here to crash like the kindness that was given to me a bunch of times when I was starting out. “Zine fair in town? Come crash”. Ask Liana Finck or anyone else who’s come to visit. It doesn’t mean sex. When I asked if she could keep a secret it was because I was sharing some Red Room pages before announcing the book and was just trying to sound cool. Tone is missing. When I said “naughty girl” it was sarcastic after she told me some simple crime or infraction she committed. The whole pile of my DMs she collected to show is just awful to look at. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to offer professional favors to anybody or use my “position” (what a joke) to get into anyone’s pants. We’re all in the art game so why not introduce new friends to old friends? When I was bringing up any professional stuff to anybody it was just common-ground conversation.

Perhaps if Dwyer had stated her concerns to Ed privately instead of irreversibly, as she put it, “publicly on the same silly app he reached out to me on,” she might have found his clarification (and needless apology, in my view) persuasive.

Instead, it would seem that Dwyer relied on the toxic griping of people with some career axe to grind or other inexplicable obsession who were actively campaigning for Ed Piskor’s destruction—and waiting eagerly to second Dwyer’s complaints with their own prepared remarks to foment a public pile-on.

Perhaps someday soon we will learn more, when the influence of manipulative boyfriends and lots of other (mostly non-existent) cartoonists who never came forth wears off, and people start listening to their gut, conscience, and reason instead.

Spoiler Alert: I have only recently seen examples online of Dwyer’s work—unbeknownst to me, it has been glowingly reviewed in The Comics Journal and elsewhere—and I agree with Ed’s estimation that it shows (or showed, as the case may be) great promise. It is only one more aspect of this horrendous tragedy that colleagues across genders seem incapable of taking any compliment or endorsement at face value without inferring some predatory motive.

Screen cap reported by The Beat.

Here’s what it boils down to: Molly Wright claims, “I’ve warned several people over the years about [Ed].” But warned them about what, exactly? That Ed was interested in women her age when she “reached out” to him? That Ed might suggest a sexual arrangement that was distasteful to her? That after casually hooking up twice, Ed wasn’t gentleman enough to arrange a graphic novel contract for her courtesy of his literary agent in New York—or otherwise further her unrealistic career ambitions? That Ed preferred mature sophisticated academics his own age over fangirls, wannabe cartoonists, or female-impersonating cosplayers?

Wright claims her experience was “similar to several women’s experience regarding Ed Piskor.” Does this mean he declined to further their unrealistic career ambitions, too? Is that the only reason they wanted to know him in the first place? What a dick.

The realization that you can’t simply sleep your way into a successful cartooning career must have come as a shock.

Wright states that Ed was “perusing” (pursuing?) other women at the same time as their casual acquaintance, and seems incensed by this. “Today I learned some of them were minors” (emphasis in the original). But if she only learned of “minors” in March 2024, Wright’s warnings to “others over the years“ could not possibly have involved a concern for the welfare of “minors”—unless perhaps her Tarot deck had presciently warned her. Was Wright really upset that Ed had conducted an innocuous chat about video games, comics, and Hunter S. Thompson with a high school senior whose boyfriend urged her on, or Wright enraged that Ed sincerely regarded Molly Dwyer as a talented cartoonist worthy of encouragement and career assistance, while regarding Wright—whom Ed described as “a petty woman scorned”—as not?

“I ask that you be supportive and kind of [sic] all the women that come forward in the coming weeks,” Wright pleads. But to date, none of these presumably victimized and abused women have come forward. One has to wonder if they ever existed in the first place—or whether they were purely the inventions of Wright to justify her “warnings” of terrible but non-existent dangers to others—since there has never been any evidence or suggestion that any woman of any age was ever harmed in any way, shape, or form by Ed Piskor.*

Wright posted she “got what she wanted” after her years-long campaign to destroy Ed Piskor. But why had she ever wanted such a dreadful thing so badly? And why did so many people help her?

*Compare this, please with the actual police reports and criminal complaints of violent assault and repeated coerced sex made recently against a noted and beloved comic book-adjacent author.

Ed’s Agent: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You | The Ed Grooming Hoax: A Recap (4k words)

Beaten to Death: The Ed Piskor Grooming Hoax (10k words) | Newsflash! Women Were Fond of Ed!

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

The Comix Beat-Up Guide to Outing Your Groomer (satire)