I have been happily unaware of the politics in the "industry". This situation with Ed made me down a rabbit hole that just makes me sad for every little thing I seem to uncover. The division, and how some peoples opinion is more "right" and rightful than others - it makes me sick. I want to keep celebrating comics, but being aware of some people's actions, there is definitely someone's work I will now see in a different light - and probably not support going forward. This situation is so sad, Ed will be missed - I will miss him. I don't think he understood he was creating a dent in this world. Thank you for a great video on the subject.
Thanks for that. And yeah, the push and pull in comics really hit a fever pitch because of the MCU. Once people saw the comics as a powerful and influential tool to wield (as well as perhaps some kind of slow train to Hollywood), it all started to crack at the seams. But there are also a lot of depressed, lonely and mentally unwell people around the hobby, both creatives and to a lesser extent, their fans. Combine all that with social media and it’s just a recipe for everything we’ve seen.
I agree with almost everything you said. My only problem with humanity is that we are too self serving (in the name of survival) as humans sometimes to the point where we don’t reach out or ask for help when we see something wrong or in need of help. We withdraw into ourselves to protect ourselves or say “it’s not me so it’s none of my business or it’s not affecting what I’m building.” We can’t survive this world alone no matter how much we would like to think we can.
@@PoopyBarfy Hm. That would depend on your ideology. Reality is binary. Either when your observation of reality ends, so goes reality; or your observation is infinite, in which case reality carries on in kind. So the question “does what we do matter”? Will be predicated on whichever you decide to believe in. Beyond that binary, there’s the determinist/materialist/physicalist perspective that every occurrence has a necessary outcome. But I would say that these ideologies don’t afford any significant hierarchy. E.g. - someone flying to the moon has the same value as someone picking something out of their teeth. It really just comes down to what you believe. Will you forget, in time, who you love? I don’t think time holds precedence over love. Time may very well be nothing much at all.
I only met Ed a handful of times and interacted online sparingly, so i would not say i knew him well or anything (just a big fan from way back), but i never got the impression he was necessarily "anti-comicsgate" just that he knew not to get involved one way or the other. You could tell there were people he wanted to interview on the show that were "CG adjacent" or whatever but he opted not to as he did not want to get shit for it. It still didn't stop them from highlighting work from those artists on occasion and it was done without handwringing introductions about how we do not condone "artist x", etc. That said, i could be way off base on that but i do know Ed was fairly vocal about not being down with "cancel culture" even if he did not always use that vernacular. The thing i personally loved about Cartoonist Kayfabe was that it felt to me it was born as an antidote to the culture war nonsense in comics, Ed and Jim just talked about art and i think a conscious effort was made to not exclude people from viewing and i think it was working for the most part. Just look at the wide array of people in absolute devastation at the loss of Ed which varies through every race, religion, and political background you can think of, you can feel a unity of sorrow. Ed was one of the last real dudes in the comics discourse and he wasn't really trying to divide people other than on matters of taste which is really all a critic should care about. He was holding the line for people like me who liked all kinds of comics and i did not want to pledge allegiance to any "side", I appreciated it immensely and i will miss him terribly. The public execution of him and his character was one of the worst things i have ever seen in my life, and people should live with the shame of what they did to that man and his family. He was one in a million and whatever hope and enthusiasm i had left for "comics" dies with him.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if the show will keep going. I kind of doubt it. It’ll probably just exist as a historical record. Hopefully more comics creators will step out of the shadows and be more vocally independent since this occurred. I think a lot of us have stayed playing in the shadows because we just didn’t want to get involved in anything in or around social media/youtube. I came on a couple weeks ago just to talk about X-men 97…then the Ed the thing happened with Ed…and then I just decided to keep going. Hoping other artists are feeling a similar vibe. We need more voices than just the political ones who’re jockeying for positioning. Thanks for your comment.
It's A shame that Ed Piskor aligned himself with people who side with 'the whisper network' because had he reached out to 'comics gate', he could've had much greater success. It would've been awesome he he worked on something with Ethan Van Skiver, or Jon Della Rose, but he hung out with the wrong crowd.
@@Launchpad05 John has a lot of extremist sociopolitical viewpoints; Ethan a bit less so. But in both cases, as well as Ed’s, the issue is that those things shouldn’t matter. But the whisper network (and to an extent CG itself) focus almost singularly on that in a lot of heir rhetoric. While the whisper network worked to get Ed Piskor to kill themselves, the same thing could be said for John and Zack with regards to Heather Antos and Alex DiCampi. They want those two persons unemployed in the comic book industry because of who they are as people. That’s why I say that it was all of us who killed Ed. Because we don’t do our moral duty of always separating art from artist.
@@WhatDoesEvilMean Now, I understand. For the record, I can separate the artist from the art. Not every actor is as good, and pure as Keanu Reeves, but I will always love Mark Hamill's Joker despite how much of A terrible person he is now.
this is more a question of the company needing to do this over the buyer. the buyer can be as picky as they want and withhold the money. it isn't a buyer's duty to do that, but it should have been the publishers and companies who supposedly have rules against such discrimination. but it has seeped in to the point even our judiciary system which is supposed to be reasonably unbiased is now biased on an 'us/them' mentality. so i'm not surprised something like this happened. the industry has been compromised and at this point there's no reason to support it anymore.
Sorry but to quote tech n9ne, "all my life above this evil, up with doves and eagles, currently ive hit ground zero under bugs and beatles." What i mean is i just stopped caring what happens to people who want harm to come to me and mine. They can eat eachother for all i care.
The irony in this situation for me is that after not paying attention to comics for over 35 years, I caught an episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe on TH-cam several months ago and it sparked my interest in comics again. If for no other reason than to snatch up some of the issues I had as a kid from the 70s and 80s, I was a comic buyer again. I started to dig a little deeper, mainly through "suggested" videos on TH-cam and I started to see the rifts/feuds present in the modern comics sphere. I guess I sort of expected it with all the "wokery" that has dogged every aspect of entertainment over the past 4-5 years. But what did I care? I was just buying "ancient" back issues and Kayfabe seemed to be way outside the realm of the politics..... Boy...was I wrong.
Yeah. And honestly the only real protest is to always work at engaging with whatever the media and separate it from the narrative - even the narrative of the person who made it.
Great video, thank you for this. Crazy world we live in, where the people with power are so evil. But together we might be able to survive and succeed.
Pretty nice video. As far ss separating art from artist: how many cgers do you think can do that with Mark Waid? Unless you dont like capes books, there is no reason not to read em.
I can’t speak to every single person’s position in and around the movement/group, but I’d say they’re reflective of most people, on average. If they themsleves or their friend haven’t been personally attacked by an artist, then they seem to do alright separating. If they have been attacked, they struggle with separating art from artist. I’d also say that people struggle with situations wherein there is physical violence against animals or people. The problem is that it’s all entirely inconsistent. If some guy working at an iPhone factory was sleeping with 50 different women and lying to them (Warren Ellis), would people who don’t like that behavior boycott Apple? iPhones are literally made utilizing child slave labor in cobalt mines and the same people who worked to end Ed Piskor’s life did it using their iPhones, ya know? I think in the end, not separating art from artist really comes down to three things 1) Some people see artists as unimportant and interchangeable 2) Some people see all art as propaganda and as such want their propagandists at the wheel and 3) individual artists are vulnerable and easy to ignore/destroy. It doesn’t inconvenience anyone to try and destroy and drive JK Rowling to suicide. Their lives move on, unimpeded.
I didn't expect Ed Piskor's death. I thought his situation would be similar to Matthew Perry's, when Perry was accused of "grooming" by a 20'ish year old woman he matched with on a dating site for high profile celebrities. Very quickly her accusations fizzled out, but that situation forever became an asterisk next to Perry's name. Even when he died, it got referenced. But that wasn't what happened with Piskor. I found out about the accusations by watching Panels to Pixels recent vid about comic book youtubers he wanted to highlight. He danced around the elephant, talking about other channels as "safe spaces" while Voldemort-ing Piskor by not naming him, but still referencing just enough. His comment section took care of the rest of it for him. I came back to the video to see if he'd deleted/ privated it (like many youtubers have theirs) or added any context/ updated it since Piskor's death. He hadn't. I left a comment and unsubbed. Cancel culture was created to bypass the due process and investigative vetting of the legal system. It's sole purpose is the destruction of the target(s), not justice. It's social nuclear warfare. Ed Piskor's death should not have happened. "We" didn't kill him, he stated flat-out who he felt did. You spoke of there being no evil people, just evil ideology. Respectfully, I disagree. Evil ideology is created by evil people, it doesn't just manifest from nothingness. Evil people do harm because they can and they enjoy it. It's that simple. What we saw with Piskor was the complexified adult version of one kid taking a toy away from a second kid to enjoy watching the second kid's distress and helplessness. Piskor described it himself, "You chipped little bits of my self-esteem away all week until I was vaporized." Evil people took whatever degree they could from him to watch him distress and make him feel helpess to the point he felt "vaporized". Internet bullies certainly had a cumulative impact, but like Caesar, Piskor knew the faces and names of the people who'd been waiting to stab into him. "There were so many out there waiting in the wings for something like this to emerge. Daryl Ayo Braithwait called it a killshot... Ramon Villalobos, Cam Del Rosario, JB Roe, Molly Wright, ... Evan Dorkin, ... Alex DeCampi... Molly D..." It's unlikely Piskor's family will see any justice done to the cancel culture perpetuaters who gleefully perpetrated their loved one's murder. In that area, I agree with you that "we" failed/ will fail Ed Piskor.
I don’t believe people invented evil nor the mechanisms to operate in service to it. Evil’s a pretty big idea, but not something I can really address in the context of this video. Evil’s actually what I decided to dedicate my entire artistic life to identifying. The problem with identifying people as evil is that it obfuscates evil itself. It isolates into the thoughts and actions of indivudals or groups. For evil people to exist they would necessarily have to be born as such, and I don’t hold that belief to be true absent some kind of supernatural intervention that I’m not sure aids in the day to day. If someone *is* evil, then evil is what they are. A person can’t become something antithetical to what they are. A bird can’t become a horse. An “evil person” thus cannot become a “good person.” However, someone holding an ideology of evil can leave it behind. And we’ve seen this play out millions of times throughout human history. People who hold truly horrific ideolgies escape them. You can’t do that if you *are* evil. I think people have exchanged capital E Evil with the small e evil. I think it’s easier to contend with. But it’s not something I observe as being true. Evil is always a choice. None of us ever become evil; we adopt it. And we can each choose to be free of it no matter how deep its claws are in us.
@@WhatDoesEvilMean Respectfully, I still disagree, but I appreciate your perspective about evil. It gave/ gives me food for thought. After the fact, the most frustrating evil about Piskor's situation is that nothing of deserving consequence will happen to those people he knew who perpetrated evil upon him. They were allowed to operate as they have up to this point, and no one is going to stop them from continuing to harm. If anything, having claimed a life will make them feel further empowered to continue about in their quests of ruination. Like Piskor said, there are so many out there waiting in the wings for something like his situation to emerge.
@@MRF1983 Yeah, I do wonder what an ideology of evil does to a person, though. Imagine how empty and hollow and dark and corrosive the existence must be for someone who exists only to devour others. Something I think a lot of people glance over with regards to these online mobs, is that they’re only mobs because they’re persons who live a significant portion of their lives online. Who truly loves, unconditionally, people like Ramon and Alex - people who’ve adopted such an ideology? What’s missing in their lives for them to need to fill it with these networks of hate; persons who spend so much of their time working to promote fear in others. And to ride on a supposed steed of righteousness to do it? I think karma is the word for it. These are not happy people. These are not content people. These are people who’ve sunk into a dark and miserable ideology. I’d pity them if not for the horrors they commit towards others.
I also think that it doesn’t service anyone to have a belief of “they will never have consequences”, because we don’t know that. I think people have painted the people in Ed’s note with a cartoonishly evil brush, imagining them as hand wringing plotters who live to devour sadness. People talk as if it brings them joy. I think this is as foolish as the people who called Ed a pedo. I believe the people Ed named will be haunted by this for the rest of their lives. I don’t think anything about what happened was empowering for anyone. I don’t envy the guilt that will haunt them forever. Especially someone like Evan Dorkin who also struggles with depression and suicidal ideation. The answer isn’t pushing more people to kill themselves. The answer is to remember that we are all people, and no matter how much we disagree, even if they don’t even see you as human, you have to remember that they aren’t an idea, they aren’t a belief, they are a person. Ed himself said he hoped he could convince people not to jump on bandwagons, and it has saddened me to see how many people are ignoring one of his last wishes. He named the names so they would know they played a role, but it wasn’t so we could then hunt them down. The answer to this isn’t more canceling, it’s forgiveness, and it’s shouting from the rooftops that Ed was human, and he made a difference in this bleak world. I’m not interested in people being dehumanized anymore. Even with JK. She dehumanizes me, and advocates for my destruction, but I can’t fight that fire with more fire. Like you said, I would pity her if not for the horrors she has dedicated her life to. What a hollow meaningless existence these people lead.
@@Scary_sarah I think also think, though, that until someone asks for forgiveness, until a predator (which Ed’s murderers are) presents how they are no longer going to prey on others, we should box them (and their ideology) in the same way we would quarantine anyone with a virus. The issue today is that none of the people listed in Ed’s letter apologized for their role. They haven’t taken accountability for his murder. They are, in fact, over on BlueSky asserting the exact opposite - that they did nothing wrong, that they are somehow the victims in all this. Such an ideology is evil and diseased and requires,as I said, quarantine until they find a way free from it.
Richard Meyer. I owe him for getting me back into comics and for making me aware of the political/ ideological battle going on behind the scenes (then) in comics. After getting shadow-banned by him for a comment criticizing Comics By Perch and bumping into many others who were shadow-banned by him during his Indiana Jones 5 meltdown, I've lost all the respect/ regard I had for him. He said at one point during the meltdown that anyone speaking ill of Indy 5 just hated Harrison Ford and wanted to ruin his last appearance as the character. He said he would never use the tools of the SJW comic pros to silence different opinions as long as they were stated in good faith and unmaliciously. He lied. People had said it was happening with Meyer in other youtubers' comment sections before and I didn't believe them. I was wrong. Does being shadow-banned/ his Indy 5 meltdown negate the validity of points he's made over the years? No. I'm sure he'll capitalize on Piskor's situation with videos talking about SJW comic pros, but his hypocrisy on silencing dissent after years and years of criticizing SJW comic pros for doing it makes me loathe him.
Meyer makes a lot of good points, despite me not always agreeing with his approach or language regarding the persons whose behaviors he interrogates. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a so-called “anti-SJW” channel that doesn’t engage in the exact same conduct as the persons who they say they hate. Whether it’s Meyer or Ethan or Eric July, et al, none of them separate art from artist. But no one’s perfect, and all of life is just us each trying to be better than the day before.
I’ve encountered people that say Comicsgate is a hate group. I explained that they tend to have more conservative views but they really aren’t hateful. They don’t want to listen.
It's easier to dehumanize people that way, claim they are the worst thing imaginable and make it even more radioactive to understand their point of view. You also marginalize the people you dehumanize enough in society, they might even slightly start turning into what you claim they are and then you can point and go "see! look how awful they are" and justify in the minds of people for whatever awful thing you do to them next. I always thought rallying around the "comicsgate" label was dumb and especially making it a right vs. left thing was counterproductive but i agreed with some of the things they were complaining about (disagreed with others) and i knew this "industry" would only get worse if these people were marginalized further and the ones who did the cancelling were elevated.
Absolutely 👍 on point!🎯⚡️Ed has a very unique voice and I had the pleasure to meet him in person at Baltimore Comic Con 2022 ,I had met Jim Rugg previously in April of that year and to see them together at their booth is always going to be a great memory for me! Like many other people I really enjoy Cartoonist Kayfabe and hope to God that it’ll continue in some way? I dunno? My condolences to Ed’s parents,family and friends at this difficult time! 🙏Ed Piskor RIP!
So well written the second half is brilliant
I have been happily unaware of the politics in the "industry".
This situation with Ed made me down a rabbit hole that just makes me sad for every little thing I seem to uncover. The division, and how some peoples opinion is more "right" and rightful than others - it makes me sick.
I want to keep celebrating comics, but being aware of some people's actions, there is definitely someone's work I will now see in a different light - and probably not support going forward.
This situation is so sad, Ed will be missed - I will miss him. I don't think he understood he was creating a dent in this world.
Thank you for a great video on the subject.
Thanks for that. And yeah, the push and pull in comics really hit a fever pitch because of the MCU. Once people saw the comics as a powerful and influential tool to wield (as well as perhaps some kind of slow train to Hollywood), it all started to crack at the seams.
But there are also a lot of depressed, lonely and mentally unwell people around the hobby, both creatives and to a lesser extent, their fans. Combine all that with social media and it’s just a recipe for everything we’ve seen.
These people don't want anyone creating 'dents' of individual thought. You either toe the line, or you're gone.
I agree with almost everything you said. My only problem with humanity is that we are too self serving (in the name of survival) as humans sometimes to the point where we don’t reach out or ask for help when we see something wrong or in need of help. We withdraw into ourselves to protect ourselves or say “it’s not me so it’s none of my business or it’s not affecting what I’m building.” We can’t survive this world alone no matter how much we would like to think we can.
RIP Ed P
None of us have legacies. Even the greatest artist will eventually be forgotten by time.
@@PoopyBarfy Hm. That would depend on your ideology. Reality is binary. Either when your observation of reality ends, so goes reality; or your observation is infinite, in which case reality carries on in kind.
So the question “does what we do matter”? Will be predicated on whichever you decide to believe in.
Beyond that binary, there’s the determinist/materialist/physicalist perspective that every occurrence has a necessary outcome. But I would say that these ideologies don’t afford any significant hierarchy. E.g. - someone flying to the moon has the same value as someone picking something out of their teeth.
It really just comes down to what you believe. Will you forget, in time, who you love? I don’t think time holds precedence over love. Time may very well be nothing much at all.
10:06 Deep Vid. Wise Words! Thanks!
Appreciate it.
It’s absolutely Orwellian what happened to Ed it pisses me off.
Rest In Piskor
I only met Ed a handful of times and interacted online sparingly, so i would not say i knew him well or anything (just a big fan from way back), but i never got the impression he was necessarily "anti-comicsgate" just that he knew not to get involved one way or the other. You could tell there were people he wanted to interview on the show that were "CG adjacent" or whatever but he opted not to as he did not want to get shit for it. It still didn't stop them from highlighting work from those artists on occasion and it was done without handwringing introductions about how we do not condone "artist x", etc. That said, i could be way off base on that but i do know Ed was fairly vocal about not being down with "cancel culture" even if he did not always use that vernacular.
The thing i personally loved about Cartoonist Kayfabe was that it felt to me it was born as an antidote to the culture war nonsense in comics, Ed and Jim just talked about art and i think a conscious effort was made to not exclude people from viewing and i think it was working for the most part. Just look at the wide array of people in absolute devastation at the loss of Ed which varies through every race, religion, and political background you can think of, you can feel a unity of sorrow. Ed was one of the last real dudes in the comics discourse and he wasn't really trying to divide people other than on matters of taste which is really all a critic should care about. He was holding the line for people like me who liked all kinds of comics and i did not want to pledge allegiance to any "side", I appreciated it immensely and i will miss him terribly. The public execution of him and his character was one of the worst things i have ever seen in my life, and people should live with the shame of what they did to that man and his family. He was one in a million and whatever hope and enthusiasm i had left for "comics" dies with him.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if the show will keep going. I kind of doubt it. It’ll probably just exist as a historical record.
Hopefully more comics creators will step out of the shadows and be more vocally independent since this occurred. I think a lot of us have stayed playing in the shadows because we just didn’t want to get involved in anything in or around social media/youtube.
I came on a couple weeks ago just to talk about X-men 97…then the Ed the thing happened with Ed…and then I just decided to keep going. Hoping other artists are feeling a similar vibe. We need more voices than just the political ones who’re jockeying for positioning.
Thanks for your comment.
It's A shame that Ed Piskor aligned himself with people who side with 'the whisper network' because had he reached out to 'comics gate', he could've had much greater success. It would've been awesome he he worked on something with Ethan Van Skiver, or Jon Della Rose, but he hung out with the wrong crowd.
@@Launchpad05 John has a lot of extremist sociopolitical viewpoints; Ethan a bit less so. But in both cases, as well as Ed’s, the issue is that those things shouldn’t matter. But the whisper network (and to an extent CG itself) focus almost singularly on that in a lot of heir rhetoric.
While the whisper network worked to get Ed Piskor to kill themselves, the same thing could be said for John and Zack with regards to Heather Antos and Alex DiCampi. They want those two persons unemployed in the comic book industry because of who they are as people.
That’s why I say that it was all of us who killed Ed. Because we don’t do our moral duty of always separating art from artist.
@@WhatDoesEvilMean Now, I understand. For the record, I can separate the artist from the art. Not every actor is as good, and pure as Keanu Reeves, but I will always love Mark Hamill's Joker despite how much of A terrible person he is now.
this is more a question of the company needing to do this over the buyer. the buyer can be as picky as they want and withhold the money. it isn't a buyer's duty to do that, but it should have been the publishers and companies who supposedly have rules against such discrimination. but it has seeped in to the point even our judiciary system which is supposed to be reasonably unbiased is now biased on an 'us/them' mentality. so i'm not surprised something like this happened. the industry has been compromised and at this point there's no reason to support it anymore.
Sorry but to quote tech n9ne, "all my life above this evil, up with doves and eagles, currently ive hit ground zero under bugs and beatles."
What i mean is i just stopped caring what happens to people who want harm to come to me and mine.
They can eat eachother for all i care.
Good head space. ☑️
The irony in this situation for me is that after not paying attention to comics for over 35 years, I caught an episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe on TH-cam several months ago and it sparked my interest in comics again. If for no other reason than to snatch up some of the issues I had as a kid from the 70s and 80s, I was a comic buyer again. I started to dig a little deeper, mainly through "suggested" videos on TH-cam and I started to see the rifts/feuds present in the modern comics sphere. I guess I sort of expected it with all the "wokery" that has dogged every aspect of entertainment over the past 4-5 years. But what did I care? I was just buying "ancient" back issues and Kayfabe seemed to be way outside the realm of the politics..... Boy...was I wrong.
Yeah. And honestly the only real protest is to always work at engaging with whatever the media and separate it from the narrative - even the narrative of the person who made it.
Wow well said sir.
Great video, thank you for this. Crazy world we live in, where the people with power are so evil. But together we might be able to survive and succeed.
Good words. 💪
Excellent video. Please keep making these.
Thanks.
This is incredible Thxu you’re the first person to get it right
Thanks for that.
Beautifully said! Rest in Power to the Great Ed Piskor!
Gaters Gonna Gate
Very well articulated, completely hits home, identifies an issue with the community and social media in general that divides people for no reason.
Thanks for that.
Good video.
Thanks man. Just started posting videos and it’s been a good outlet for me.
Pretty nice video. As far ss separating art from artist: how many cgers do you think can do that with Mark Waid? Unless you dont like capes books, there is no reason not to read em.
I can’t speak to every single person’s position in and around the movement/group, but I’d say they’re reflective of most people, on average.
If they themsleves or their friend haven’t been personally attacked by an artist, then they seem to do alright separating. If they have been attacked, they struggle with separating art from artist.
I’d also say that people struggle with situations wherein there is physical violence against animals or people.
The problem is that it’s all entirely inconsistent. If some guy working at an iPhone factory was sleeping with 50 different women and lying to them (Warren Ellis), would people who don’t like that behavior boycott Apple? iPhones are literally made utilizing child slave labor in cobalt mines and the same people who worked to end Ed Piskor’s life did it using their iPhones, ya know?
I think in the end, not separating art from artist really comes down to three things 1) Some people see artists as unimportant and interchangeable 2) Some people see all art as propaganda and as such want their propagandists at the wheel and 3) individual artists are vulnerable and easy to ignore/destroy.
It doesn’t inconvenience anyone to try and destroy and drive JK Rowling to suicide. Their lives move on, unimpeded.
I like Waid's work but dislike his antics. Wouldn't call myself CG though others might because I don't specifically condemn them.
Damn good video.
Thanks man. I started making some videos and it’s been a good outlet. Thanks for watching. Hope to see you around.
Thxu for this
I didn't expect Ed Piskor's death.
I thought his situation would be similar to Matthew Perry's, when Perry was accused of "grooming" by a 20'ish year old woman he matched with on a dating site for high profile celebrities.
Very quickly her accusations fizzled out, but that situation forever became an asterisk next to Perry's name. Even when he died, it got referenced.
But that wasn't what happened with Piskor.
I found out about the accusations by watching Panels to Pixels recent vid about comic book youtubers he wanted to highlight.
He danced around the elephant, talking about other channels as "safe spaces" while Voldemort-ing Piskor by not naming him, but still referencing just enough. His comment section took care of the rest of it for him.
I came back to the video to see if he'd deleted/ privated it (like many youtubers have theirs) or added any context/ updated it since Piskor's death.
He hadn't. I left a comment and unsubbed.
Cancel culture was created to bypass the due process and investigative vetting of the legal system. It's sole purpose is the destruction of the target(s), not justice. It's social nuclear warfare.
Ed Piskor's death should not have happened. "We" didn't kill him, he stated flat-out who he felt did.
You spoke of there being no evil people, just evil ideology. Respectfully, I disagree. Evil ideology is created by evil people, it doesn't just manifest from nothingness.
Evil people do harm because they can and they enjoy it. It's that simple. What we saw with Piskor was the complexified adult version of one kid taking a toy away from a second kid to enjoy watching the second kid's distress and helplessness.
Piskor described it himself,
"You chipped little bits of my self-esteem away all week until I was vaporized."
Evil people took whatever degree they could from him to watch him distress and make him feel helpess to the point he felt "vaporized".
Internet bullies certainly had a cumulative impact, but like Caesar, Piskor knew the faces and names of the people who'd been waiting to stab into him.
"There were so many out there waiting in the wings for something like this to emerge. Daryl Ayo Braithwait called it a killshot... Ramon Villalobos, Cam Del Rosario, JB Roe, Molly Wright, ... Evan Dorkin, ... Alex DeCampi... Molly D..."
It's unlikely Piskor's family will see any justice done to the cancel culture perpetuaters who gleefully perpetrated their loved one's murder. In that area, I agree with you that "we" failed/ will fail Ed Piskor.
I don’t believe people invented evil nor the mechanisms to operate in service to it. Evil’s a pretty big idea, but not something I can really address in the context of this video. Evil’s actually what I decided to dedicate my entire artistic life to identifying.
The problem with identifying people as evil is that it obfuscates evil itself. It isolates into the thoughts and actions of indivudals or groups. For evil people to exist they would necessarily have to be born as such, and I don’t hold that belief to be true absent some kind of supernatural intervention that I’m not sure aids in the day to day.
If someone *is* evil, then evil is what they are. A person can’t become something antithetical to what they are. A bird can’t become a horse. An “evil person” thus cannot become a “good person.”
However, someone holding an ideology of evil can leave it behind. And we’ve seen this play out millions of times throughout human history. People who hold truly horrific ideolgies escape them. You can’t do that if you *are* evil.
I think people have exchanged capital E Evil with the small e evil. I think it’s easier to contend with. But it’s not something I observe as being true. Evil is always a choice. None of us ever become evil; we adopt it. And we can each choose to be free of it no matter how deep its claws are in us.
@@WhatDoesEvilMean Respectfully, I still disagree, but I appreciate your perspective about evil. It gave/ gives me food for thought.
After the fact, the most frustrating evil about Piskor's situation is that nothing of deserving consequence will happen to those people he knew who perpetrated evil upon him.
They were allowed to operate as they have up to this point, and no one is going to stop them from continuing to harm. If anything, having claimed a life will make them feel further empowered to continue about in their quests of ruination.
Like Piskor said, there are so many out there waiting in the wings for something like his situation to emerge.
@@MRF1983 Yeah, I do wonder what an ideology of evil does to a person, though. Imagine how empty and hollow and dark and corrosive the existence must be for someone who exists only to devour others. Something I think a lot of people glance over with regards to these online mobs, is that they’re only mobs because they’re persons who live a significant portion of their lives online.
Who truly loves, unconditionally, people like Ramon and Alex - people who’ve adopted such an ideology? What’s missing in their lives for them to need to fill it with these networks of hate; persons who spend so much of their time working to promote fear in others. And to ride on a supposed steed of righteousness to do it?
I think karma is the word for it. These are not happy people. These are not content people. These are people who’ve sunk into a dark and miserable ideology. I’d pity them if not for the horrors they commit towards others.
I also think that it doesn’t service anyone to have a belief of “they will never have consequences”, because we don’t know that. I think people have painted the people in Ed’s note with a cartoonishly evil brush, imagining them as hand wringing plotters who live to devour sadness. People talk as if it brings them joy.
I think this is as foolish as the people who called Ed a pedo. I believe the people Ed named will be haunted by this for the rest of their lives. I don’t think anything about what happened was empowering for anyone. I don’t envy the guilt that will haunt them forever. Especially someone like Evan Dorkin who also struggles with depression and suicidal ideation. The answer isn’t pushing more people to kill themselves. The answer is to remember that we are all people, and no matter how much we disagree, even if they don’t even see you as human, you have to remember that they aren’t an idea, they aren’t a belief, they are a person.
Ed himself said he hoped he could convince people not to jump on bandwagons, and it has saddened me to see how many people are ignoring one of his last wishes. He named the names so they would know they played a role, but it wasn’t so we could then hunt them down. The answer to this isn’t more canceling, it’s forgiveness, and it’s shouting from the rooftops that Ed was human, and he made a difference in this bleak world.
I’m not interested in people being dehumanized anymore. Even with JK. She dehumanizes me, and advocates for my destruction, but I can’t fight that fire with more fire. Like you said, I would pity her if not for the horrors she has dedicated her life to. What a hollow meaningless existence these people lead.
@@Scary_sarah I think also think, though, that until someone asks for forgiveness, until a predator (which Ed’s murderers are) presents how they are no longer going to prey on others, we should box them (and their ideology) in the same way we would quarantine anyone with a virus.
The issue today is that none of the people listed in Ed’s letter apologized for their role. They haven’t taken accountability for his murder. They are, in fact, over on BlueSky asserting the exact opposite - that they did nothing wrong, that they are somehow the victims in all this.
Such an ideology is evil and diseased and requires,as I said, quarantine until they find a way free from it.
I have conservative and liberal views, but when you hate everything that's different from you, you probably will appear like a hate group.
Richard Meyer. I owe him for getting me back into comics and for making me aware of the political/ ideological battle going on behind the scenes (then) in comics.
After getting shadow-banned by him for a comment criticizing Comics By Perch and bumping into many others who were shadow-banned by him during his Indiana Jones 5 meltdown, I've lost all the respect/ regard I had for him.
He said at one point during the meltdown that anyone speaking ill of Indy 5 just hated Harrison Ford and wanted to ruin his last appearance as the character.
He said he would never use the tools of the SJW comic pros to silence different opinions as long as they were stated in good faith and unmaliciously. He lied.
People had said it was happening with Meyer in other youtubers' comment sections before and I didn't believe them. I was wrong.
Does being shadow-banned/ his Indy 5 meltdown negate the validity of points he's made over the years? No.
I'm sure he'll capitalize on Piskor's situation with videos talking about SJW comic pros, but his hypocrisy on silencing dissent after years and years of criticizing SJW comic pros for doing it makes me loathe him.
Meyer makes a lot of good points, despite me not always agreeing with his approach or language regarding the persons whose behaviors he interrogates.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across a so-called “anti-SJW” channel that doesn’t engage in the exact same conduct as the persons who they say they hate.
Whether it’s Meyer or Ethan or Eric July, et al, none of them separate art from artist. But no one’s perfect, and all of life is just us each trying to be better than the day before.
rip dear ed
I’ve encountered people that say Comicsgate is a hate group. I explained that they tend to have more conservative views but they really aren’t hateful. They don’t want to listen.
It's easier to dehumanize people that way, claim they are the worst thing imaginable and make it even more radioactive to understand their point of view. You also marginalize the people you dehumanize enough in society, they might even slightly start turning into what you claim they are and then you can point and go "see! look how awful they are" and justify in the minds of people for whatever awful thing you do to them next.
I always thought rallying around the "comicsgate" label was dumb and especially making it a right vs. left thing was counterproductive but i agreed with some of the things they were complaining about (disagreed with others) and i knew this "industry" would only get worse if these people were marginalized further and the ones who did the cancelling were elevated.
Absolutely 👍 on point!🎯⚡️Ed has a very unique voice and I had the pleasure to meet him in person at Baltimore Comic Con 2022 ,I had met Jim Rugg previously in April of that year and to see them together at their booth is always going to be a great memory for me! Like many other people I really enjoy Cartoonist Kayfabe and hope to God that it’ll continue in some way? I dunno? My condolences to Ed’s parents,family and friends at this difficult time! 🙏Ed Piskor RIP!
Boycott boycott boycott