Punk Planet Year Eight, issues 44-49.

2024 marks 30 years since the start of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. To commemorate that milestone, I am writing 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

"I have read Punk Planet since its inception. I have always vehemently disagreed with you about your sniveling attitude towards the Palestinians and the Muslim/Arab world in particular. I think it is irresponsible. I think it has always been treasonous. I think it is disgusting. And I hope and pray that…"

A dial tone.

That was what was waiting for me on the voicemail at Punk Planet's small office on September 12, 2001.

A day before I had watched the events of September 11 unfold from that same office. The first plane had hit as I was driving. In my memory, it was reported on NPR as a small plane, sort of a concerning news report but not one that I followed up on as I got in and got to work. A phone call a few minutes later told me a second plane had hit, and I dug a small TV up from under a desk and set it up, it got a weak signal. I watched the towers collapse through TV static alone in the office.

We were a couple months into work on our second Art & Design theme issue at that point and, through a snowy TV screen, the world changed in an instant. Art felt deeply irrelevant right then. I can't remember the exact timing, but that issue was cover dated November/December 2001, which would have been on newstands sometime in mid-October, which would have meant it went to the printer sometime in mid-September. There was no changing up at that point. Plus, in those uncertain days after September 11, what story we could tell was still unclear.

The voicemail the next day helped clarify things: We'd do what we always do. We'd do interviews, we'd lean on our regular writers and find other voices from activism and academia, and we'd try and tell a complex story of a complex time.

The cover for our post-September 11 issue.

It took longer than normal. Issue 47, which features a stark red cover with a silhouetted plane dropping a bomb on it, is maybe our only issue with a single month on it: February 2002. In the introduction I explained that pulling together the issue was hard. There was a lot going on, and I remember it being very hard to stay focused. From the time the first plane hit to this issue coming out, the US had invaded Afghanistan as the first strike on the "War on Terror" that would follow. It was a time of Freedom Fries. Of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" being inescapable. It was not a time of a great deal of critical press.

The resulting package, called "War Songs in Ten Verses" offered a diverse array of voices all speaking about a world seen through a lens deeply critical of American power. It wouldn't have happened without the world of contributing editor Joel Schalit and regular contributor Jeff Guntzel, who both brought their own critical lenses to the collection. Looking it all over again, I'm struck at how multifaceted the critique is. From an interview with a spokesperson from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to calling out the clampdown on press freedoms that followed 9/11, to multiple pieces looking at how America had itself supported terrorism over the years. It was complex and challenging. I remember how much work it was for all of us, but it felt like the times demanded it.

The opening spread for our War Songs package.

I don't know if the person who left that voicemail on September 12 read it. Probably not. But I do know this. Two issues later, PP49, there's a letter in our letters section that I'd completely forgotten about until I looked over the issues from Year Eight:

My name is Jon and I'm writing to tell you about how Punk Planet has opened my eyes and made me look at things a little differently. I work for the Fox News Channel in New York City. Their slogan is "the network America trusts for fair and balanced news."

I never thought anything of it until I picked up the latest Punk Planet and I read the article with ten different things about the war that you might not have known, or whatever the title was. After reading it, I turned on my TV and I started watching what the anchors at my work were saying and how what they were saying was totally one-sided and it really was not fair and balanced at all.

In looking back over the years of Punk Planet, sometimes the amount of work that we put into it feels crazy. It was not a big magazine. At its height, we were selling somewhere around 18,000 issues. Nobody was making any money. It always teetered on the precipice of financial disaster (untill eventually it fell). But that letter was why.

In moments of uncertainty—whether moments of global magnitude or moments of a much more personal nature—we offered a voice that told you you weren't alone, and that questioning things was important, especially when the questions weren't being asked elsewhere.

And sometimes someone would hear that voice and it would change their life.

A shoutout to the incredible cover Love and Rockets' Jaime Hernandez drew for the Art & Design 2 issue. And Punk Planet is probably the only magazine to ever put Ralph Nader and Steve Albini on the same cover.

Year Eight Miscellaney: The Art & Design 2 issue was legit incredible. It featured four covers designed by Jaime Hernandez (above), Shepard Fairy (pre-Obama 'Hope'), poster artist Jay Ryan/The Bird Machine, and papercut artist Nikki McClure. It really deserves more play than this essay gives it. On a more bummer note, I noticed in looking over this year that our paper stock changed from the thicker white we had been using for a bit back to newsprint. It had gotten too expensive to print on better stock. And then there's the note at the end of the introduction of PP49: "Starting next issue, Punk Planet's going to cost another dollar. It was either that or fold up shop." While there are still years before the end, it's clear that staying afloat was getting more difficult.