2024 marked 30 years since the start of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. To commemorate that milestone, I wrote 13 posts over 13 months, each one about a single year of the magazine. A year of learning, a year of trying, a year of making something impossible possible.

Read: Year One | Year Two | Year Three | Year Four | Year Five | Year Six | Year Seven | Year Eight | Year Nine | Year Ten | Year Eleven | Year Twelve | Year Thirteen

Everything is real shitty right now, so I thought I'd take a different approach with this essay looking at Punk Planet Year 10. I thought I'd answer the question of how Jess Mariano winds up reading a copy of Punk Planet in an episode of the Gilmore Girls. And not just any copy, but "The Final Countdown," our anti-George W Bush issue, PP60 March/April 2004.

I explained the basic premise of the "Final Countdown" in its introduction: "Over and over again, people have mentioned how if we're serious about getting Bush out of office, the time to start planning and working to that end is now." At the time the introduction was written, the Democratic primaries had not yet started. The point was that agitating to get Bush out didn't need to wait on a candidate, and the sooner we could get started the better.

The issue featured interviews with nine activists and organizations across a pretty broad political spectrum to get perspective and ideas for how to start organizing for the election later that fall. We also called on friends in the gigposter and underground design scenes to create black-and-white mini posters that were available for anyone to copy and paste up. By this point we'd moved to a cavernous warehouse space nestled between the L tracks and the Metra tracks that we split with the Bird Machine poster shop, so we actually printed up a number of runs of the posters and mailed them to folks across the country as well.

Continue reading →