John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82

New York Times

06-04-2025

John Peck, a cultural omnivore known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, said his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.
Mr. Peck was not as well known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. That was perhaps in part because his interests were so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late 1960s into the '70s, said in an interview.
'To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,' Mr. Kenton said.
Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.
He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, 'How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,' playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera 'Dallas.' Mr. Peck once called it his 'crowning achievement.'
His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and '50s and wrote with sardonic humor ('Is There Life After Meatloaf?'), while offering trustworthy criticism.
'As far as I know, he was the first to do it,' Mr. Kenton said. 'Some people were drawing cartoons with people from the Grateful Dead in it, but John was reviewing the records. He wasn't just making a joke.'
Peter Wolf, the former lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for whom Mr. Peck designed a T-shirt that became the group's logo, said in an interview: 'I can't think of anybody else who did it, that 'Ripley's Believe It or Not!' style. For me, he was an original.'
Mr. Peck also made concert posters for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and, most notably, for the final concert in the United States by the British supergroup Cream, in Providence in November 1968. The poster featured the band's name in a faux advertisement for unfiltered Camel cigarettes, which Mr. Peck smoked for 50 years. The Providence Journal reported that one of the posters sold for more than $3,000 in 2016.
'To me he was an important figure of that era,' the cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman said. 'I thought it was fascinating how he was going back and forth between modern times and the past.'
In Providence, Mr. Peck was most popular for a noirish 1978 poster commenting on the city, which at first seemed snarly but was ultimately sanguine. It remains popular. The poster's comic-book-style panels, referencing actual street names, read, in part: 'And Friendship is a one way street. Rich folks live on Power Street. But most of us live off Hope.'
Mr. Peck illustrated 'Comix: A History of Comic Books in America' (1971), written by a friend, the historian Les Daniels, which was among the first serious appraisals of the subject. And, in an embrace of low art and a critique of what he viewed as the snobbery of television criticism, Mr. Peck became a TV critic himself.
In a 1987 interview with Terry Gross of NPRs 'Fresh Air,' Mr. Peck said he believed that all forms of popular culture were connected: 'When you get down there on the street level or on the consumer level, people don't really make the distinctions between one medium and the other.'
In that same interview, Mr. Peck mused about the cultural absurdities and contradictions of television. While humans worried about too much exposure in front of the screen, he dryly noted, the pig named Arnold Ziffel, a porcine couch potato seen on the 1960s sitcom 'Green Acres,' was held in 'very high esteem' for watching TV constantly, 'because watching television is such a breakthrough for an animal.'
Mr. Peck's lack of widespread recognition was partly by choice. He sometimes wore disguises and claimed not to have allowed himself to be photographed for half a century. Mr. Wolf, who became a friend, described Mr. Peck affectionately as a phantom in a hat and trench coat, pale and with nicotine-stained fingers, who 'always seemed to appear out of the dark end of the street.'
When Mr. Friedman included an illustration of Mr. Peck in his book 'Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix' (2022), he first had to figure out what Mr. Peck looked like, whether that was his real name, and whether he was a single person or a group of people.
'He was the Keyser Söze of underground comics,' Mr. Friedman said, referring to the evasive character at the center of the 1995 movie 'The Usual Suspects.'
Mr. Peck acknowledged to The Providence Journal in 2016 that he worked with a clip-art ethos of 'don't draw what you can trace, and don't trace what you can paste,' and that he had 'an inability to draw anything more complex than psychedelic hand lettering.'
His ideas relied heavily on retooling the work of Matt Baker, who was among the first Black cartoonists to gain success in the 1940s and '50s, whose characters included scantily dressed female crime fighters and who also worked on romance comics.
Such extensive borrowing 'probably put him at odds with some of the more serious underground cartoonists,' said Steven Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. 'In the broader picture, now that we're talking about history, it mattered.'
John Frederick Peck was born on Nov. 16, 1942, in Brooklyn and grew up in Connecticut. His father, Frank Peck, was assistant superintendent of public schools in Fairfield, Conn., and later held a similar position in Greenwich. His mother, Eleanor Mary (Delavina) Peck, was a teacher.
Mr. Peck came to cartooning via an unconventional path, after receiving a degree in electrical engineering in 1967 from Brown University in Providence. Engineering was a career choice more his parents' wish than his own; Mr. Peck instead went underground, forming a publishing collective known as Mad Peck Studios, whose cartoons, rock posters, humorous advertisements and reviews were anthologized in 1987.
As a disc jockey with the moniker Dr. Oldie, Mr. Peck, who referred to himself as 'the dean of the University of Musical Perversity,' hosted a weekly radio show in Providence called 'Giant Juke Box' for more than a decade until 1983. He played doo-wop, R&B, early rock 'n' roll and novelty songs, and he became an early proponent of mixtapes. He also partnered for decades with a friend, Jeff Heiser — who also co-hosted Mr. Peck's radio program for five years — in organizing conventions for record collectors.
Mr. Peck's sisters are his only immediate survivors. His marriage to Vicky (Oliver) Peck, a humorist who had helped create his cartoons and who went by the comic persona I.C. Lotz., ended in the late 1970s.
Mr. Peck scoured flea markets, yard sales, record stores and discount emporiums for records and other cultural ephemera, which occupied two floors of his house, a cluttered domicile that did not always have heat or running water. His record library was said to include roughly 30,000 singles and several thousand albums. Some might have considered him a hoarder, but his friends called him an archivist, because his collections were organized and labeled.
'For a guy who smoked a lot of pot, he didn't forget anything,' Mr. Heiser said. 'He had this stuff down cold.'