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Underground Cartoonist and Cultural Figure John “Mad Peck” Peck Dies at 82
John Peck, known as “The Mad Peck,” a multifaceted figure in underground culture celebrated for his wryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey, and record collector, passed away on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82 years old. Peck’s unique blend of artistic endeavors and ornate eccentricity cemented his place in the cultural landscape.
Cause of Death
His sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber, confirmed that the cause of death, which occurred in a hospital, was a ruptured aortic aneurysm.
A Broad Range of Talents
While not as widely recognized as some of his contemporaries in underground comix, such as Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman, Peck’s diverse interests may have contributed to his less mainstream profile. Gary Kenton, who served as his editor at Fusion and Creem magazines during the late 1960s and 70s, noted in an interview that Peck’s talents spanned multiple creative fields. Kenton remarked, “To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,” emphasizing the breadth of Peck’s abilities.
Pioneering Comic Strip Record Reviews
Peck made significant contributions to the appreciation of comic books, illustrating one of the earliest academic texts examining their cultural significance. He is also credited as potentially being the first cartoonist to create record reviews in a four-panel comic-strip format, blending visual art with music criticism.
Academic Pursuits and Sardonic Wit
In addition to his artistic pursuits, Peck co-authored an academic paper in 1983 with literary commentator Michael Macrone. The paper, titled “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” explored the evolution of television through a playful lens, referencing phallic symbolism in the popular prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” Peck himself considered this essay to be his “crowning achievement.”
Comic Strip Music Criticism
Peck’s distinctive comic-strip music critiques were featured in publications such as Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. He adopted a retro aesthetic inspired by the 1940s and 50s, delivering insightful and dependable criticism with sardonic humor, as exemplified by titles like “Is There Life After Meatloaf?”.
Kenton further elaborated on Peck’s pioneering approach: “As far as I know, he was the first to do it. 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.”
Original Artistic Vision
Peter Wolf, former lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for whom Peck designed a T-shirt that became the group’s iconic logo, described Peck as “an original.” Wolf noted, “I can’t think of anybody else who did it, that ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’ style.”
Iconic Concert Posters
Peck’s artistic output extended to concert posters, creating memorable designs for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Notably, he designed the poster for Cream’s final United States concert in Providence in November 1968. This poster cleverly incorporated the band’s name into a mock advertisement for Camel cigarettes, a brand Peck himself smoked for five decades. A testament to their collectibility, The Providence Journal reported that one of these posters fetched over $3,000 at auction in 2016.
Providence Icon
Cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman considered Peck “an important figure of that era,” admiring “how he was going back and forth between modern times and the past.” In Providence, Peck achieved local fame for a 1978 poster capturing the city’s essence. Initially seeming cynical, the noir-style artwork ultimately conveyed a sense of optimism and remains popular. Its comic-book panels, incorporating actual street names, included the lines: “And Friendship is a one way street. Rich folks live on Power Street. But most of us live off Hope.”
Exploring Popular Culture
Peck’s intellectual curiosity extended to academia. He illustrated “Comix: A History of Comic Books in America” (1971), by historian Les Daniels, a groundbreaking serious evaluation of the medium. Embracing “low art” and challenging perceived elitism in television criticism, Peck also became a television critic.
In a 1987 interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Peck articulated his belief in the interconnectedness of popular culture: “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.”
Observations on Television and Anonymity
In the same interview, Peck reflected on the cultural paradoxes of television. He wryly observed that while people fretted about excessive screen time, Arnold Ziffel, the pig television enthusiast from the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres,” was “held in very high esteem” for constant TV watching, as “watching television is such a breakthrough for an animal.”
Peck’s limited public recognition was partly intentional. He was known to use disguises and claimed to have avoided being photographed for half a century. Peter Wolf affectionately described Peck as “a phantom in a hat and trench coat,” pale with nicotine-stained fingers, who “always seemed to appear out of the dark end of the street.”
The Enigma “Mad Peck”
When Drew Friedman sought to feature Peck in his book “Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix” (2022), he had to unravel the mystery of Peck’s identity – his appearance, real name, and even whether he was a single individual or a collective. Friedman likened Peck to “the Keyser Söze of underground comics,” referencing the elusive figure from the film “The Usual Suspects.”
Artistic Ethos and Influences
Peck admitted to The Providence Journal in 2016 that his artistic method involved a clip-art ethos of “don’t draw what you can trace, and don’t trace what you can paste,” and confessed “an inability to draw anything more complex than psychedelic hand lettering.”
His creative concepts heavily borrowed and reinterpreted the work of Matt Baker, a pioneering Black cartoonist of the 1940s and 50s known for characters like scantily clad female crime fighters and his contributions to romance comics.
Legacy and Historical Context
Steven Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, suggested that Peck’s extensive appropriation “probably put him at odds with some of the more serious underground cartoonists.” However, Heller also acknowledged, “In the broader picture, now that we’re talking about history, it mattered.”
Early Life and Career Path
John Frederick Peck was born on November 16, 1942, in Brooklyn and spent his childhood in Connecticut. His father, Frank Peck, was an assistant superintendent of public schools in Fairfield, Conn., later holding a similar position in Greenwich. His mother, Eleanor Mary (Delavina) Peck, was a teacher.
Peck’s path to cartooning was unconventional. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Brown University in Providence in 1967. While engineering aligned with his parents’ aspirations, Peck pursued his own creative underground path. He established Mad Peck Studios, a publishing collective that produced cartoons, rock posters, satirical advertisements, and reviews, which were compiled in a 1987 anthology.
Dr. Oldie and Record Collecting
As “Dr. Oldie,” Peck hosted a popular weekly radio program in Providence called “Giant Juke Box” for over a decade until 1983. He curated a diverse playlist of doo-wop, R&B, early rock ’n’ roll, and novelty songs, and became an early advocate for mixtapes. Calling himself “the dean of the University of Musical Perversity,” Peck also collaborated with Jeff Heiser for decades in organizing conventions for record collectors, with Heiser also co-hosting Peck’s radio show for five years.
Survivors and Archival Passion
Mr. Peck is survived by his sisters. His marriage to Vicky (Oliver) Peck, a humorist and collaborator who contributed to his cartoons under the persona I.C. Lotz., ended in the late 1970s.
Peck’s passion for collecting cultural artifacts was legendary. He meticulously scoured flea markets, yard sales, record stores, and discount outlets for records and ephemera, amassing a vast collection that occupied two floors of his home, a characterful but often unheated and plumbingly challenged residence. His record library reportedly encompassed around 30,000 singles and several thousand albums. While some might have considered him a hoarder, his friends regarded him as an archivist, given the organized and cataloged nature of his collections.
“For a guy who smoked a lot of pot, he didn’t forget anything,” recalled Mr. Heiser. “He had this stuff down cold.”