Edward R. Piskor, Jr., a cartoonist and online broadcaster who traversed the worlds of mainstream and independent comics and became a known social media personality, died by apparent suicide on Monday, April 1, 2024. His death was confirmed by his family. He was 41.
Piskor was best known for his acclaimed 12-issue comic book series Hip Hop Family Tree, which catalogs the artistic origins and cultural legacy of hip hop and utilizes a style informed by the aesthetic of 1970s comic book offset printing. The collected Hip Hop Family Tree Book 1: 1975-1981 debuted at the #7 spot on the New York Times Paperback Graphic Novels Bestseller List on March 30, 2014, and Hip Hop Family Tree Book 2: 1981-1983 received an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work in 2015. Following the HHFT series in 2017, Piskor conceived the X-Men: Grand Design project for Marvel Comics, both a synthesis and reinterpretation of decades of X-Men storylines and lore, which ushered in the continuing Grand Design series of books for Marvel by other artists. Piskor returned to Fantagraphics in 2021 with his top-selling Red Room series, an explicit, provocative send-up of splatterpunk and exploitation movie influences matched with his interest in outlaw online culture. Piskor co-hosted the popular YouTube channel Cartoonist Kayfabe with fellow Pittsburgh cartoonist and friend Jim Rugg from 2018 until his death.
Piskor was born on July 28, 1982 in Homestead, a borough of Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania. His parents Ed and Diane Piskor were employed by Homestead Steel Works, which, like many surrounding Pennsylvania ironworks and steel mills, shuttered its operations in the mid 1980s. His obsession with comics and drawing gave him an escape from the economic and social turmoil that formed the backdrop of his childhood. “The cheapness of pencils and paper made them constantly accessible to me,” Piskor stated in a 2016 Washington Post interview. “I didn’t have health insurance, so I wasn’t allowed on the football team. My folks didn’t have cash to invest in a trumpet for school band, so I really took to drawing.” The Piskor family remained in Homestead until relocating to Munhall, PA in 1996.
In his teenage years, Piskor suffered a near-fatal bout of colitis resulting in a case of intestinal bleeding that saw him hospitalized for a month. Believing the incident to be caused by the anxiety he faced in school, Piskor claimed to have convinced his parents to allow him to be self-homeschooled for the rest of his high school career following his recovery. His new, unorthodox schedule granted him longer pockets of time in which to study the likes of Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and the canon of superhero comics. His curiosity also led him to the world of alternative independents like Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez, Kim Deitch - and most especially Robert Crumb, whom Piskor would often cite as his central influence.
Through his comics reading he spotted ads for the Kubert School, a technical comics institution founded by cartoonist Joe Kubert in Dover, New Jersey. After graduating high school Piskor attended Kubert for one year before dropping out, later citing the need to deprogram his comics practice from his brief tenure at what he called “Superhero University.” At Kubert, Piskor felt that his burgeoning drive to become a singular success in comics differentiated him from his peers. The reality of the industry, which needed its ditch-diggers, too, was anathema to his vision: “They teach you to be a hack at the school, meaning that you should take every possible job that comes your way and just crap out everything that interests you the least,” Piskor stated in a 2006 interview with Rob Clough. “I really don't agree with this position and I even contribute this idea for [sic] the degradation of quality in comics.”
Not enthused for a future of behind-the-scenes drudgery, Piskor exited the Kubert School after receiving what he saw as adequate technical training. He produced his first self-published minicomic, Deviant Funnies #1, in 2004. He began corresponding with comic book writer Harvey Pekar after finding his address in Pekar's series American Splendor, sending him a copy of Deviant Funnies. After building a rapport, Pekar assigned Piskor to draw four pages for the 2004 book American Splendor: Our Movie Year. Upon completion, Pekar asked for another 24 pages, this time with a deadline of just one week. Piskor, then age 21, found the task daunting, but committed nonetheless. “[I]t became apparent that he was testing me a little bit,” he said in a 2013 Comics Journal interview. “But right after delivering, he was like, ‘Ok, man. Do you want to work on this 150 page book with me?’ Obviously I was delighted.”
Piskor’s next task was illustrating Pekar’s graphic novel Macedonia: What Does It Take to Stop a War?, co-written with Heather Roberson and published by Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2007. “Ed was so focused, a living laser,” recalls cartoonist and close friend Tom Scioli. “He was not afraid of the hard work of draftsmanship. When he was working with Harvey Pekar, he’d draw a car and it looked like a shoebox.... But he worked really hard on each page and learned from his mistakes, so by the time he finished the Macedonia graphic novel, he was not the same artist who began it.” Piskor and Pekar would go on to work together again, joined by editor Paul Buhle, on The Beats: A Graphic History, published by Hill and Wang in 2009. Piskor also collaborated, as artist, with the veteran undergrounder Jay Lynch on several short stories.
Piskor capitalized on his newfound momentum not by seeking bigger, buzzier collaborations, but by returning to his own self-directed projects. Wizzywig, a minicomics series chronicling the exploits of composite proto hacker Kevin "Boingthump" Phenicle, saw Piskor grapple with developing his own voice in an original longform story. Written, drawn and distributed by Piskor from 2008 through 2011, Wizzywig would be published in a collection by Top Shelf in 2012, earning him critical acclaim and an Eisner nomination for Best Publication Design with Chris Ross in 2013. At this time he also balanced his comics work with a stint as a character designer for the short-lived Mongo Wrestling Alliance animated series, televised on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block in 2011.
With Wizzywig, Piskor began testing the viability of his work beyond the market of dyed-in-the-wool comics readers. He spoke at hacker convention Notacon in 2009, landed an interview to discuss hacking with MTV in 2012, and incorporated “nerdcore” artist Adam WarRock in the Wizzywig book trailer - still a novel concept for comics marketing in the early 2010s. His skill for spotting unique marketing crossover opportunities would serve him on all his following projects, and eventually help catapult his comics to a new level of reach.
As Piskor’s work found its footing in the world of physical publishing, he also recognized the potential of sharing comics online - especially comics with nostalgia-based content aimed at the culturally dominant millennial generation. He found a kinship with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder of Boing Boing, a site once coined “the most popular blog in the world.” Having been impressed by Wizzywig, Frauenfelder was delighted to receive a pitch for a weekly strip from Piskor. “It was clear to us that he had done his research [for Wizzywig] to create something that rang true, unlike every other pop culture portrayal of hacker culture at that time,” Frauenfelder recalls. Boing Boing began publishing Piskor's new Brain Rot weekly comic on the site in 2011.
Brain Rot covered a range of Piskor’s personal interests, including professional wrestling, Nintendo video games and EC Comics, which gave him reason to test different narrative voices. The new, more freeform series also saw Piskor explore a style which, ironically, didn’t present like a webcomic: the strips were designed to replicate comic book offset printing, including an abundant use of halftone, texture and digitally “aged” paper backgrounds. Publishing online also meant unlimited freedom to experiment with color, a new frontier for a cartoonist whose work had been printed in black & white until that point. “I was impressed by Ed's dedication,” says Frauenfelder. “He consistently produced a plotted, scripted, penciled, inked, colored, and hand-lettered comic on a wide range of topics every seven days without ever missing a deadline.”
Piskor’s working relationship with Boing Boing also saw him participate in other collaborative media projects through the site. Created by Jim Rugg and Jasen Lex, the podcast Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (not to be confused with a podcast of the same name by Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner) brought Piskor on as producer in its second season. Tom Scioli would also appear as a guest in several episodes. TMSIDK typically featured interviews with cartoonists or comics-adjacent guests, and was arguably the test drive for what would later become Cartoonist Kayfabe.
Shortly after launching Brain Rot, Piskor’s focus shifted away from experimental subject matter and further into his interest in hip hop. In the strip “Similarities Between Hip Hop and Comic Books,” Piskor drew comparisons between what he viewed as two undervalued pieces of American culture that centered self-promotion as an art unto itself. Within a few months, the recurring Brain Rot strips became solely about hip hop history and were given a new title: Hip Hop Family Tree.
Serialized on Boing Boing through 2015, Hip Hop Family Tree would become Piskor’s career highlight. Spanning 360 total pages, the comic recounts the trajectory of hip hop from outsider culture in 1970s New York through the beginnings of rap’s commercial radio viability in the mid 1980s. Even with his lifelong interest in the subject, the project was still a massive undertaking of labor and research for him. “I am a fan, for sure, but I'm handling this in a journalistic fashion as much as possible,” Piskor told LAist in 2015. “I want to create something that is highly comprehensive so that if a fan or scholar or academic who is interested in learning this history… they're forced to use a comic book, which is very important to me.” By this time, he had also established a significant online presence with a self-styled personal brand that visually resembled the characters he drew, another factor that helped lead to the comic’s popularity. “Once he saw the power of social media, he began to make connections,” recounts Jacq Cohen, Executive Director of Communications & Publicity at Fantagraphics. “Ed harnessed the power of the internet to broaden his readership.”
Following the popularity of the online strip for Boing Boing, Piskor approached Fantagraphics to collect the series in print. “When Ed submitted HHFT to us, I only knew him as one of Harvey Pekar's cartoonists,” says Fantagraphics co-founder Gary Groth. “But that meant, to me, that he was on the indie/alt scale of cartoonists… it struck me as a project of passion and integrity and that's why we bought it.” Following its comic book serialization, Fantagraphics would collect HHFT in four treasury volumes from 2013 through 2016, later releasing a deluxe omnibus of the series in 2023. The praise for its depth of research and global interest in its subject matter found Fantagraphics in a perpetual state of reprinting. “I, perhaps naively, had no idea it would become the sales blockbuster it became,” Groth admits.
While the series found acclaim across the critical landscape, it also raised questions about some of its content given its author’s identity, particularly around its use of phonetic vernacular, representations of Black artists that could be perceived as caricature, and general misgivings about whether or not the project was appropriative. Though none of its detractors seemed to significantly blemish the books’ success, these open-ended questions contributed to a low decibel grumbling on social media that would follow Piskor through his subsequent projects.
After firmly establishing himself as a supernova entity in indie comics with HHFT, Piskor next set his sights on the Big Two in 2017. “I won an Eisner Award for Hip Hop Family Tree. I was... kind of chasing a feeling of satisfaction or happiness, [and] when I got that Eisner Award, I simply did not feel that,” Piskor confessed to NPR in 2018. “Even walking up to the stage to pick it up, I'm like, 'Oh man. It didn't do it for me. Let me do something else.'” At age 35, Piskor would return to one of his childhood obsessions, the X-Men, finding himself with a real chance to work on the franchise as an established artist. His enthusiasm for his next endeavor was, as always, infectious. “He was over the top about his next big idea: the Grand Design,” friend and cartoonist Carol Tyler remembers. “I thought, ‘Following up Hip Hop Family Tree with this? Wow, this guy’s on fire!’”
X-Men: Grand Design was a dream project for Piskor, and one he was able to do on his own terms as a comics auteur, a peak he reached in spite of the idea that anonymous gruntwork was the only realistic option back in his days at the Kubert School. “I get to control every aspect of the page,” Piskor continued to NPR. “A single person making a thing is completely [different] from a team of people. The collaborative teams [who create superhero comics] have to figure out a way to work harmoniously. Since I'm the only one putting pencil to paper, my harmonious creative team is sitting here right inside my brain at this very moment.”
Piskor wrote, drew, inked, colored and lettered each of the six 40-page issues that made up the 2017-2019 series, an unusual amount of control for Marvel to relinquish to any creative. The success of the project cleared the way for future Grand Design runs, which Pittsburgh cohorts Jim Rugg and Tom Scioli would join in on with their compendia of Hulk and Fantastic Four, respectively.
At the same time, Piskor and Rugg were launching their latest broadcast venture, Cartoonist Kayfabe, on YouTube. “[Ed] had this idea to do a YouTube show about comics and we would start with Wizard [magazine commentaries], and we would kind of expand out from there,” Rugg explained to the Comics Journal in 2020. “I was on board.” The channel’s content grew to include looks at favorite comics, livestreams, behind-the-scenes creative processes, promotional content and interviews with comics professionals. Their branding borrowed terms from the world of professional wrestling, of which both were fans; the term “kayfabe” itself refers to the illusion of reality in scripted wrestling storylines. Interviews with industry pros became “shoot interviews,” their weekly check-in vlogs were “Kayfabe weekly shoots,” loose talk about fellow cartoonists was “cutting a promo,” the mainstream comics worker bees were “jobbers,” etc. The channel provided up close and personal discussions with beloved creators which viewers, many of whom were aspiring cartoonists, found to give invaluable insight into the industry.
Cartoonist Kayfabe amassed over 1,800 videos with 91,000 subscribers over five years, paving new ground for comic/artist commentators and dealing Rugg and Piskor a newfound influence in the comics world. “Not only did Kayfabe catapult Ed’s and Jim’s careers, but it also created a platform for other cartoonists to find a larger audience,” explains Jacq Cohen. “In the comics biz, we called it the ‘Kayfabe effect.’ When Ed and Jim would talk about a book on their YouTube show, one could watch the online sales rack up.” The channel implored viewers to expand the horizons of their comics consumption, and the two would usually sign off with the imperative “Read more comics.”
Piskor’s final completed project was his serialized Red Room horror series for Fantagraphics, published across 12 comic book issues from 2021 through 2023. His most critically divisive work, the comic depicts various acts of torture, gore and murder in the titular Red Room, which viewers pay to watch online for the sake of entertainment. “I have to say that so much of it comes from my experience with YouTube and social media in general,” Piskor told Comic Book Resources in 2021. “Archetypes exist in anonymous comment sections online. You have your people-pleasers, the eternal haters, losers who think they're speaking truth to power when really they just like complaining, the fanboys. I've never paid much attention to online commenters… [but it] does provide great reference for my comic.”
Piskor found himself enjoying the constant challenge of ratcheting up the shock value issue by issue. “This is tongue-in-cheek pulp horror comics,” he continued for CBR. “I'm having so much fun figuring out different ways to creep myself out while trying to create a comic that I would absolutely love to come across in the wild.” Despite its gruesome subject matter, Red Room was frequently cited as Fantagraphics’s top-selling comic book series in decades.
The comic drew heavy criticism in March 2022 when Piskor released an image of one of several variant covers for issue #3 of Red Room: Trigger Warnings, which parodied the cover to the first volume of Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. The cover was seen to be in especially bad taste in light of Tennessee's then-recent ban on Maus being taught in school curriculums, and increasing reports of antisemitic incidents in the United States. Rugg, who had drawn the cover, and publisher Fantagraphics withdrew the variant and issued an apology via social media. Piskor himself did not comment on the incident, which drew further ire from critics online. In late 2023, Piskor announced a new webcomic titled Switchblade Shorties, which he began serializing via a dedicated Instagram account in January 2024.
On March 23, 2024, a young female cartoonist alleged on social media that Piskor had made inappropriate advances towards her through Instagram when she was 17 years old. In the following days, two other women accused Piskor via social media of past sexual misconduct. In the ensuing uproar, Piskor deleted both the Cartoonist Kayfabe and his personal Twitter accounts, and temporarily removed the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel, leaving regular viewers concerned. The channel was restored a few hours later. Coverage of the allegations continued.
Consequently, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust announced that Piskor’s upcoming exhibition at 707 Penn Gallery was postponed indefinitely. In the following days, Rugg announced that he was severing his working relationship with Piskor. Fantagraphics also stated they had no upcoming projects scheduled together. Piskor did not issue a public statement regarding the allegations.
On the morning of April 1, 2024, he released a suicide note via email and Facebook. His death was confirmed by family that evening. A memorial is scheduled for Saturday, April 20, at the Phantom of the Attic comic book store in Oakland, Pittsburgh.
Piskor had remained in close proximity to Pittsburgh for the duration of his life, often citing his dedication and loyalty to his family in interviews. Despite acknowledging adversities in his childhood, Piskor would gleefully show drawings he made as a child on episodes of Cartoonist Kayfabe, acknowledging that his circumstances forged a drive to create comics as long as he could. His family began a dedicated Instagram account to “keep his name and story alive forever.” He is survived by his parents and three siblings.
Piskor leaves behind a considerable body of comics work created in the span of just 20 years, and the scope of his impact is immeasurable. About the medium he dedicated his life to, Piskor said, “The best description I’ve ever heard of why people who draw comics do it is: ‘It’s a medium you do because you can’t not do it.’ That’s me, man.”
