on taking

When we speak of social media “mobs,” of main characters, of accusations regarding sexual impropriety and the way in which they are discussed in the public sphere, we tend to center the accused. I wonder if this is the product of society’s pathological insistence that men are its protagonists, or the notion that these guys are standing trial, or what. This sense of injustice regarding people (mostly men) getting cancelled or shunned or ostracized for minor infractions was crystallized, if not invented, by Jon Ronson in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015). That book is more or less an idiot's reckoning with social media, and so far as I can tell it has become the conventional wisdom.

There is of course another way to look at things – in fact several other points of view we should consider. (There always are.) One is social media’s function as a fire alarm. Another is a valve for a person who has been offended. Of course, the word “offended” has come to connote anything from rape to parasocial feelings about Bean Dad and his ilk, and that makes this conversation harder. I suggest to you that such conflations are not a mistake. In the same way that everything is crabs, all offenders are Bean Dad: some poor guy who did something that was blown out of proportion when he was, at the end of the day, just trying to put food on his family. What reasonable person would want to get in the way of that?

I invite you to consider some different protagonists, to truly think of them as individuals in their fullness and not just the supporting cast of one man’s story. Social media, in addition to its much-discussed function of putting people on blast, gives voice to people who wish to air a wrong, for one reason or other. Their motivations can be complicated and may not have a “goal,” so we tend to misunderstand and misrepresent what they are doing. I think it’s fair to say that these airings of grievance come from some experience of feeling fed up: with a person, with “comics,” with the way things are. But that’s just my opinion. More objectively, we can observe that rarely, if ever, does a callout result in the accuser’s improved wellbeing or professional advancement, as is so often claimed. On the internet, as in our criminal justice system, that’s just not how accusations tend to work. 

On the day that Ed Piskor took his own life, I was a click away from publishing an essay I had written about the situation (about comics culture, not so much Piskor) for this defunct blog. I was double-checking something and saw the letter on reddit just before it hit my corner of social media. I found myself in the unusual and unsettling position of evaluating how weird and bad I would have felt if I had, in fact, published that piece. There is of course a difference between what you know on an intellectual level and the way you feel, and both are true in their own way. I thought about the time, many years ago, I reported out an essay about a man in comics that I did not publish. In the dozen or so interviews I conducted for that piece, concern about the man’s potential suicide was raised many times. Looking at that situation as objectively as possible, trying to discern the fine (perhaps indistinguishable) line between his manipulation and his vulnerability, I considered how much harm never comes to light due to fear of further harm. I mention this not as a lament for that particular effort so much as an illustration of the firm FACT that there is no space — no air, no room, no quarter — for discourse about impropriety in comics. It is my belief that men urgently need to work to improve these conditions and make such conversations possible, for the safety of everyone. 

Anyone who has read this far is likely familiar with the specter of suicide that has long haunted our horrible Discourse about disgraced men in comics. It has been a take — a worry, a threat, a talking point — for as long as I’ve been paying attention. I could go into one of my Comics Psychology 101 spiels about how any accusation (of impropriety, of racism, of sexism, and so on) (criminal act or minor annoyance, it doesn’t matter) immediately escalates to the level of existential crisis for men in comics. All of that is true. But we find ourselves in an impossible situation where that perspective, while fundamentally incorrect, has been given terrible weight. All of this is textbook abuser logic, and just because we can identify it doesn’t mean it isn’t doing its job. I think a lot of people don’t realize that abuse does not require ill intent. That all kinds of people are abusive with different states of knowingness.

Across comics culture’s various scandals, for lack of a better word, people have a tendency to see the world in terms of binaries that don’t exist. I suppose that decades of comic book reading gives you your good guys and your bad guys. In the professional networks of men who have been accused of impropriety, for example, there’s an eagerness to label people as colluders or innocent bystanders. I think most of the time these circles are filled with male colleagues who exist in more of a blank gray zone, practicing something like willful oblivion or disinterest. In the face of that vacuum, it’s incumbent upon us to give these situations the consideration they have never had.

In the wake of the Piskor allegations, but before his death, Fantagraphics gave a one-sentence comment about how it had “no future projects in the works" with Piskor. Jim Rugg posted a short statement on Instagram about the dissolution of Comics Kayfabe. The Piskor/comics culture piece I never published was largely about how I did not find those responses to be sufficient accountings of the situation. In particular, I found the Fantagraphics statement insufficient given Gary Groth’s long history of holding forth for thousands and thousands of words about his intellectual stance on "provocative" comic art and his insistence that it is utterly separate from harm in real life. This stance becomes difficult to parse when pages of those comics become a prop in an alleged grooming scandal. We are not talking about a direct causal relationship, some intrinsic evil possessed by a dumb old comic book, but how the reverent culture around those objects creates or contributes to things that happen in the world. To discuss this currency is not the same thing as regulating it. 

Let’s take a step back from the painful topics of self-harm and sexual impropriety and go back to a moment in time before this all occurred. How should we reconcile Groth’s voluminous discourse on provocative art and cancel culture with, say, the blog statement that Fantagraphics published when the Red Room Holocaust parody cover was pulled? The publisher said, "Going forward, we will be more cognizant of our comics covers." Certainly we can agree that more cognizance is required. But there is a pattern worth noting here, a tendency to quickly disassociate when real shit hits the fan from the work and values that were previously trumpeted. What this implies to me is a lack of care and a kind of spiritual disinterest. 

In So You You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson eulogizes the careers of men who were “destroyed” (they weren’t) while minimizing the violent threats and material losses of a woman who got caught in the backlash a callout: her tweet about two guys’ inappropriate comments at a tech conference. In discussion with Ronson, that woman, Adria Richards, referenced the Margaret Atwood quote about how men are afraid that women will laugh at them while women are afraid of being killed. These are obviously not the same problem. Ego death is neither violence nor the threat of violence, even if it feels that way. An astute review of Ronson’s book connects the dots that the author himself could not, discussing the gendered ways in which social media shitstorms tend to play out. I invite you to consider that analysis in light of our various protagonists, and also to consider the demographic constellation of the “murderers” who Piskor named in his letter, most or maybe all of whom have been severely harassed over the past few weeks.

Professional consequences for unprofessional behavior are not “cancellation” or exile. Such consequences are probably better understood as business decisions than capitulations to public pressure. Other choices could be made and perhaps should be made, at least in theory. Status and class touch all of this in complicated ways. If we understand professional distancing as an act of economic self-preservation, rather than a punishment for the accused, its real utility comes into focus. I don’t mean that as a moral critique of anyone. In the world we live in, economic self-preservation is value neutral and probably prudent. 

In sharp contrast, public discourse, and particularly discourse around allegations of impropriety, rarely has an immediate goal. It is not prudent or tidy work. To take an extreme example of this dynamic, Christine Blasey Ford didn’t make a public allegation against Brett Kavanaugh with the expectation that it would impact the trajectory of his career. She said, “What’s important is that I tell them this information.” Public discourse is, in its purist sense, a goal in itself. One problem is that all these various ideas, all these many motivations and actions and consequences, get mixed up in people’s minds when they encounter a situation that forces them to think about stuff that they have spent entire lifetimes ignoring, avoiding, or overlooking, with the varying degrees of intent and negligence those words imply. 

Well, anyway, the post I didn’t publish that day was about how I found those public statements to be lacking, and part of my point was that they issue from a fundamental lack of consideration in the broader culture. What we are talking about is a lack of discourse rather than an excessive amount of it. For the stakes to be lowered, more discourse about inappropriate behavior is necessary, both in the public sphere and among colleagues and friends, about criminal behavior and microagressions and the whole spectrum of stupid things that men do in between. What we need to remember is that shame is not really powered by social media. It feeds in quiet, where it’s easier to single people out. It is unmoved by your empty pledge.

I know I may come across as Frederic Wertham or Tipper Gore or some other prudish loser when I say that the time has long since passed for Comics to apply some scrutiny and skepticism to the complex network of associations between Art and Life, all the way back to the ur-provocateur Robert Crumb. This is not in the spirit of cancelling or publicly shaming men, who are still generally presumed to be life’s protagonists. It is out of human consideration for marginalized and vulnerable people who have been wronged and the faint hope that the industry will get better for everyone. It's insane to me that this is considered a radical view. 

Piskor’s final statement is haunting and cruel, a terrible document, and I feel worried and (say it) angry on behalf of every person who was named in it. I strongly disagree with his notions about “murderers” and his assertions about social media, and feel he harmfully misrepresented the people he cared for as much or more than the ones he didn’t. I hope the people who were in his life recognize that his thoughts were deeply distorted and untrue. I'm genuinely so sorry for what they are going through. My hope for comics culture more generally is that this horribly sad situation will not be cathected into misguided meditations on the ills of social media or, worse, weaponized and/or monetized invective against the most vulnerable people in the industry. But that is already happening.

We could go through the letter line by line and I could try to tell you why it’s wrong. Truly some people need to hear it. But that isn’t a responsible or kind way to handle words that were written by a suffering person who died in crisis. A person whose worst bully was obviously himself. To quote someone else instead: “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.” It's on the living to decide whether to seek out the grace that Piskor could not offer himself or others. I wrote this to tell you I think the world is what we make it.