Ugly pepper plants

Anyone know what this is on our pepper plants and what to do about it?

If you can rub it off with your fingers, I bet it is black sooty mold, which is a non parasitic fungal infestation that you can wash off. Maybe some aphids have been making honeydew and causing the sooty mold to spread?
If you can't rub it off, it is something else but I'm not sure what. That's my first best guess based on wha tit looks like though.

Thanks for the response! It Doesn’t rub off. We’ve never seen it before in our 45 years of growing a garden. It’s always something, argh.

So I was thinking about the little raised spots nearer to the stem and enlarged the photo - I haven't seen that before either. It doesn't seem to be scale or any insect, but the term "Oedema" kept popping up when I searched similar images. That isn't a disease per se, it's a condition of the plant's cells not managing water correctly. I wasn't familiar with this issue and wondered if you had heard of it. It's treatable, unlike some of the blight and bacterial issues.

It's an odd combination, the blackened leaves and the raised corky spots. But the kind of curling of the leaf, and the spots, combined with eliminating sooty mold and the fact that it's super early for blight to show up make me wonder if the main issue is the spots and not the discoloration, as in the darkening of the leaves is secondary to the raised bumps? And the closest match for those is oedema that I am thinking of.

With what I know about the climate you're in, there are some kind of wacky things that can happen with peppers and tomatoes but like you said, it's not a spot on (sorry) match for any of the common ones. Wish I had more ideas!