New Yorker Cartoonist P.C. Vey Dies at 70 From Pancreatic Cancer

Q: What kept a legendary cartoonist submitting to The New Yorker for fifteen years before finally landing his first published drawing?

What kept P.C. Vey submitting to *The New Yorker* for 15 years was persistence rooted in belief that he belonged in that world of cartooning — and a willingness to keep working through rejection in one of the magazine’s most selective traditions. Vey said he began submitting cartoons in 1978 while still a senior at the School of Visual Arts. Although his first published drawing did not appear until 1993, he was not entirely shut out during those years. In the early 1980s, *The New Yorker* bought some of his ideas for Charles Addams, giving him evidence that his humor and instincts were good enough for the magazine even before his own drawings were accepted. That kind of small validation mattered in a field known for extreme competition. Related reporting notes that *The New Yorker* buys only a tiny fraction of the roughly 1,500 cartoons submitted each week. Success there has long depended on repeated pitching, patience and resilience. Vey’s later career suggests that endurance paid off. After Bob Mankoff became cartoon editor, Vey became a regular contributor and one of the magazine’s most recognizable cartoonists. His long apprenticeship was sustained by grit, belief in his comic voice, and the encouragement of those early idea sales that showed he was already close to breaking through.

1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Oct 13

P.C. Vey died on Sept. 17 at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and his wife said pancreatic cancer was the cause.
The 70-year-old was one of The New Yorker’s most prolific cartoonists, known for cheerfully pessimistic drawings about romance, office life, restaurants, cats, health care, technology, greed and death.
Colleagues ranked him among the magazine’s cartoon greats, with Bob Eckstein writing that Vey belonged on the “Mount Rushmore of Cartooning.”
Vey had lived for years in New York’s East Village before moving in 2018, leaving behind a body of work marked by long-faced characters, bulging eyes and fatalistic one-liners.