John Peck, a cultural omnivore often known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous fashion as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and document collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Windfall, R.I. He was 82.
The reason for his demise, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, stated his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.
Mr. Peck was not as well-known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Artwork Spiegelman. That was maybe partially as a result of his pursuits have been so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late Sixties into the ’70s, stated in an interview.
“To me, he could be a High 10 cartoonist, a High 10 D.J., a High 10 rock critic,” Mr. Kenton stated.
Mr. Peck illustrated one of many first scholarly works on the significance of comedian books. And he was maybe the primary cartoonist to write down document critiques in four-panel comic-strip type.
He additionally wrote an instructional paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone concerning the evolution of tv; its title, “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” playfully referenced phallic symbolism within the oil-soaked prime-time cleaning soap opera “Dallas.” Mr. Peck as soon as known as it his “crowning achievement.”
His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and different music publications, and in The Village Voice. He labored in a retro fashion repurposed from the Nineteen Forties and ’50s and wrote with sardonic humor (“Is There Life After Meatloaf?”), whereas providing reliable criticism.
“So far as I do know, he was the primary to do it,” Mr. Kenton stated. “Some individuals have been drawing cartoons with individuals from the Grateful Useless in it, however John was reviewing the data. He wasn’t simply making a joke.”
Peter Wolf, the previous lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for whom Mr. Peck designed a T-shirt that grew to become the group’s emblem, stated in an interview: “I can’t consider anyone else who did it, that ‘Ripley’s Consider It or Not!’ fashion. For me, he was an authentic.”
Mr. Peck additionally made live performance posters for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and, most notably, for the ultimate live performance in the USA by the British supergroup Cream, in Windfall in November 1968. The poster featured the band’s identify in a fake commercial for unfiltered Camel cigarettes, which Mr. Peck smoked for 50 years. The Windfall Journal reported that one of many posters bought for greater than $3,000 in 2016.
“To me he was an essential determine of that period,” the cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman stated. “I believed it was fascinating how he was going backwards and forwards between trendy occasions and the previous.”
In Windfall, Mr. Peck was hottest for a noirish 1978 poster commenting on the town, which at first appeared snarly however was in the end sanguine. It stays common. The poster’s comic-book-style panels, referencing precise road names, learn, partially: “And Friendship is a a method road. Wealthy people dwell on Energy Road. However most of us dwell off Hope.”
Mr. Peck illustrated “Comix: A History of Comic Books in America” (1971), written by a pal, the historian Les Daniels, which was among the many first critical value determinations of the topic. And, in an embrace of low artwork and a critique of what he seen because the snobbery of tv criticism, Mr. Peck grew to become a TV critic himself.
In a 1987 interview with Terry Gross of NPRs “Fresh Air,” Mr. Peck stated he believed that each one types of common tradition have been related: “Whenever you get down there on the road degree or on the patron degree, individuals don’t actually make the distinctions between one medium and the opposite.”
In that very same interview, Mr. Peck mused concerning the cultural absurdities and contradictions of tv. Whereas people nervous about an excessive amount of publicity in entrance of the display screen, he dryly famous, the pig named Arnold Ziffel, a porcine sofa potato seen on the Sixties sitcom “Green Acres,” was held in “very excessive esteem” for watching TV consistently, “as a result of watching tv is such a breakthrough for an animal.”
Mr. Peck’s lack of widespread recognition was partly by alternative. He generally wore disguises and claimed to not have allowed himself to be photographed for half a century. Mr. Wolf, who grew to become a pal, described Mr. Peck affectionately as a phantom in a hat and trench coat, pale and with nicotine-stained fingers, who “all the time appeared to seem out of the darkish finish of the road.”
When Mr. Friedman included an illustration of Mr. Peck in his e-book “Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix” (2022), he first had to determine what Mr. Peck looked like, whether or not that was his actual identify, and whether or not he was a single individual or a gaggle of individuals.
“He was the Keyser Söze of underground comics,” Mr. Friedman stated, referring to the evasive character on the middle of the 1995 film “The Standard Suspects.”
Mr. Peck acknowledged to The Providence Journal in 2016 that he labored with a clip-art ethos of “don’t draw what you’ll be able to hint, and don’t hint what you’ll be able to paste,” and that he had “an lack of ability to attract something extra complicated than psychedelic hand lettering.”
His concepts relied closely on retooling the work of Matt Baker, who was among the many first Black cartoonists to achieve success within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, whose characters included scantily dressed feminine crime fighters and who additionally labored on romance comics.
Such intensive borrowing “in all probability put him at odds with among the extra critical underground cartoonists,” stated Steven Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Grasp of Fantastic Arts Design program on the Faculty of Visible Arts in Manhattan. “Within the broader image, now that we’re speaking about historical past, 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 faculties in Fairfield, Conn., and later held the same place in Greenwich. His mom, Eleanor Mary (Delavina) Peck, was a trainer.
Mr. Peck got here to cartooning through an unconventional path, after receiving a level in electrical engineering in 1967 from Brown College in Windfall. Engineering was a profession alternative extra his dad and mom’ want than his personal; Mr. Peck as an alternative went underground, forming a publishing collective often known as Mad Peck Studios, whose cartoons, rock posters, humorous ads and critiques have been anthologized in 1987.
As a disc jockey with the moniker Dr. Oldie, Mr. Peck, who referred to himself as “the dean of the College of Musical Perversity,” hosted a weekly radio present in Windfall known as “Big Juke Field” for greater than a decade till 1983. He performed doo-wop, R&B, early rock ’n’ roll and novelty songs, and he grew to become an early proponent of mixtapes. He additionally partnered for many years with a pal, Jeff Heiser — who additionally co-hosted Mr. Peck’s radio program for 5 years — in organizing conventions for document collectors.
Mr. Peck’s sisters are his solely rapid survivors. His marriage to Vicky (Oliver) Peck, a humorist who had helped create his cartoons and who glided by the comedian persona I.C. Lotz., ended within the late Nineteen Seventies.
Mr. Peck scoured flea markets, yard gross sales, document shops and low cost emporiums for data and different cultural ephemera, which occupied two flooring of his home, a cluttered domicile that didn’t all the time have warmth or working water. His document library was stated to incorporate roughly 30,000 singles and a number of other thousand albums. Some may need thought of him a hoarder, however his pals known as him an archivist, as a result of his collections have been organized and labeled.
“For a man who smoked quite a lot of pot, he didn’t neglect something,” Mr. Heiser stated. “He had these things down chilly.”
