P.C. Vey, whose cheerfully pessimistic cartoons in The New Yorker depicted the inescapable absurdity of romantic relationships, corporate life, hoity-toity restaurants, cats, health care, technology, greed and death, died on Sept. 17 at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 70.
His wife, Tina Vey, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. The couple had lived in the East Village for many years but left New York in 2018 after the last of Mr. Vey’s favorite record stores relocated to Brooklyn and, as he put it, “I really didn’t want to go to Brooklyn.”
Among The New Yorker’s most prolific cartoonists, Mr. Vey was revered by his colleagues, who etched his name into the magazine’s pantheon alongside giants like Charles Addams, Sam Gross, Jack Ziegler and others.
“P.C. Vey,” the cartoonist Bob Eckstein wrote on his blog, “is one of the faces on the Mount Rushmore of Cartooning.”
Mr. Vey’s characters had long faces, bulging eyes and a knack for wise, fatalistic quips. The style was sui generis; the gags, gently savage.
Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor from 1997 to 2017, said in an interview that Mr. Vey’s view of the world was singularly his, yet with an ethos familiar to anyone trying to survive the indignities of life.
“Peter’s world was one in which fumbling human beings are on a treadmill to oblivion,” Mr. Mankoff said. “Nothing’s going to change. There’s really only two modes in which they exist — bad and worse.”
Working at a small table in his East Village apartment, Mr. Vey drew dozens of cartoons a week, submitting them to the magazine in batches of 20 — an output that baffled other cartoonists, who typically submitted five or six.
His creative method was a version of throwing things at the wall to see what stuck.
“I’ll draw a situation: a couple at home, people in an office or walking down the street,” Mr. Vey told The Daily Hampshire Gazette, of Northampton, Mass., in 2019. “Then I throw in something odd, like a meteorite out the window or a dancing cat.”
Then he’d ponder subversive, out-of-left-field captions.
“I kind of think of it as stopping the thought process or creating a mind freeze by taking an inexplicable or unexpected or unanticipated turn in a direction that nobody, including myself, was prepared to go,” he said in an interview with the cartoonist Michael Maslin.
The effect, Mr. Maslin said in an interview, was “like being ambushed.”
Peter Christopher Vey was born in Manhattan on Oct. 24, 1955, and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, J. Forest Vey, was an artist who taught at Poly Prep Country Day School, in Brooklyn, and his mother, Marguerite, was an interior designer and photographer.
As a boy, he had surgery and discovered The New Yorker in the hospital gift shop.
“I had to go back afterward for checkups, and every time I would always go back to the gift shop and pick up The New Yorker,” he told The Cartoon Bank Blog in 2009.
He attended Poly Prep. Working in the school’s library, he eagerly awaited the delivery of The New Yorker.
“I remember kids coming up to me saying, ‘Did you see the new story by Woody Allen?’” he said.
The cartoons were his real love; he was constantly drawing his own.
At the School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan, he majored in media arts and cartooning. He submitted his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978, the year he graduated. It was rejected.
He continued to submit cartoons for more than a decade while working as a freelance illustrator for The New York Times and other newspapers, in addition to publishing cartoons in magazines like Mad, National Lampoon and The Harvard Business Review.
In 1993, The New Yorker finally bought one of his cartoons, a drawing of a mother reading to her child in bed:
Mr. Vey published collections of his cartoons, including “If Cats Could Talk!” (1991), “Cats Are People Too!” (1992) and “Bad Business: A Rescue Package for the Recession-Weary” (2009).
He also helped write two animated movies with Bill Plympton: “The Tune” (1992) and “I Married a Strange Person” (1997).
“He was a well-oiled joke machine,” Mr. Eckstein wrote. “The result was a massive and stellar body of work.”
Mr. Vey and his wife married in 1988. He is also survived by a brother, Geoffrey Vey.
Like many cartoonists, Mr. Vey was often asked whether he considered doing stand-up comedy.
“It’s just cartoons all the way, ever since I was a kid,” he said on the “New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Podcast” in 2021.
It was a line of work that fit his personality.
“Another reason I got into doing gags in the magazines is because I wouldn’t have to see people,” he said on the podcast. “I like the idea of getting up and walking 10 feet to a table and getting to work and not having to deal with an office full of people.”
Even with his success, “I feel like I’m just starting out,” he said, adding that he was amazed that anyone was willing to “actually buy cartoons from me.”
The podcast host interrupted him.
“I think you’re your own worst critic,” the host said. “Because I think your cartoons are outstanding.”
“Oh, thank you,” Mr. Vey said. “I’m just fishing for a compliment.”
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