John Peck, an underground manga artist known as Mud Peck, dies at 82

Known as a crazy peck with glamorous eccentricity, as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector, John Peck, known as a crazy peck with a fluent eccentric style, was 82 on March 15th.

The cause of his death in the hospital was an aneurysm that ruptured in his aorta, his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.

Peck was less well-known and less praised than underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. That was probably because his interest was so broad that Gary Kenton, who edited him for Fusion and Creem Magazines from the late 1960s to the 70s, said in an interview.

“For me, he'll be a top 10 cartoonist, a top 10 DJ and a top 10 rock critic,” Kenton said.

Peck presents one of the first academic works on the importance of comic books. And he was probably the first manga artist to write a record review in the form of a four-panel comic strip.

He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with literary commentator Michael Macron on the evolution of television. Its title, “How JR Gets Out of the Air Force and Derrick's Meaning,” referenced the playful phallic symbolism in the oil-stained primetime melodrama “Dallas.” Peck once called it “the best achievement.”

His musical criticism of comic strips appeared in Fusion, Cream, Rolling Stone, other music publications, and Village Voices. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and 50s, writing in Thirdnic humor (“Is there a life after meatloaf?”).

“As far as I know, he did it first,” Kenton said. “Some people were drawing cartoons with people from the Grateful Dead, but John was reviewing records. He wasn't kidding me.”

Peter Wolf, former lead singer of the J. Geils band, said in an interview that Peck designed the T-shirt that became the group's logo: For me, he was original. ”

Peck also created a concert poster for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, most notably featuring the band's name in a fake ad for filtered camel cigarettes that Peck smoked for 50 years for its final concert in the US by British Supergroup Cream, held in Providence in November 1968. The Providence Journal reported that one of the posters sold for over $3,000 in 2016.

“For me, he was a key figure in that era,” said cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman. “I found it fascinating to see him travelling between the present and the past.”

In Providence, Peck was the most popular poster for the 1978 Neurish. It remains popular. The comic book style panel on the poster refers to the actual street name and reads in part.

Peck showed that “The History of American Comic Book History” (1971) was one of the first serious reviews of the subject, written by his friend, historian Les Daniels. And in his embrace of low art and his critique of what he regarded as silly television critic, Peck became a television critic.

In an interview with Teligross of NPRS Fresh Air in 1987, Peck said he believes that all forms of popular culture are connected.

In the same interview, Peck meditated on the cultural absurdity and contradictions of television. Humans were worried about being exposed too much in front of the screen, but he said it was dry, but a pig named Arnold Siffel, a pig couch potato found on the 1960s sitcom Green Acre, was held with “very high respect” and “very high respect” because “watching TV is a very high viewpoint for animals.”

Peck's widespread lack of awareness was due to some choice. He occasionally dressed in disguise and claimed that he had not allowed himself to photograph himself for half a century. Wolf, who became friends, lovingly explained that Peck was fantastic in his hat and trench coat.

When Friedman included an illustration of Peck in his book Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix (2022), he had to understand what Peck looked like in the beginning, whether it was his real name, whether he was alone or a group of people.

“He was Keiser Söse from the underground comic,” Friedman said, referring to the evasive character at the heart of the 1995 film The Ornal Suspects.

Peck in the Providence Journal in 2016 worked in the spirit of clip art, “Draw what you can trace and don't track what you can paste,” admitting that he “can't draw anything more complicated than a psychedelic letter.”

His ideas relied heavily on remodeling the work of Matt Baker, one of the first black cartoonists to succeed in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The Master of Fine Arts Design Program is a great opportunity to help people understand,” said Stephen Heller, who is co-chaired by the Master of Fine Arts Design Program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “In the wider picture, that was important because we're talking about history.”

John Frederick Peck was born in Brooklyn on November 16, 1942 and grew up in Connecticut. His father, Frank Peck, was the vice principal of a public school in Fairfield, Connecticut, and later established a similar position in Greenwich. His mother, Eleanor Mary (Dellavina) Peck, was a teacher.

Peck came to cartoons via the unconventional path after earning his degree in electrical engineering in 1967 from Brown University in Providence. Engineering was more of his parents' desired career choice than his own. Instead, Peck went underground and formed a publishing group known as Mad Peck Studios. The comics, rock posters, humorous ads and reviews were sourced in 1987.

Until 1983, he held weekly radio shows at Providence, known as the Giant Jukebox, as a disc jockey with Dr. Oldy, Monica, who called himself the “Dean of the Perversion College of Music.” He also partnered with his friend Jeff Heiser (Peck's radio show for five years and organised a record collector's convention.”

Mr. Peck's sister is his only immediate survivor. Her marriage to Vicki (Oliver) Peck was a humorist who helped create the manga and went to comics Persona Ritz, ended in the late 1970s.

Peck washed away discount emporiums at flea markets, yard sales, record stores, records and other cultural ephemera. It took up the second floor of his house. His record library is said to contain around 30,000 singles and thousands of albums. Some may have seen him as a hoarder, but his friends called him an archivist.

“He didn't forget anything because of the guy who smoked a lot of pots,” Heiser said. “He was making things like this cold.”