Dan Sinker/blog

Leading and Following: Punk Planet, Year 10

Punk Planet Year Ten, issues 56-61.

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 | Year Nine | Year Ten

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.

Jess reading Punk Planet #60 in Season 4, episode 21 of the Gilmore Girls. Really.

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.

PP60 poster by The Bird Machine.

PP60 poster by Jeff Kleinsmith.

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.

PP60 poster by Leia Bell.

PP60 poster by Aesthetic Apparatus.

The resulting package was a perfect encapsulation of what Punk Planet had become, 10 years into our run: uncompromising in its politics, radical in its artistic vision, but also always striving to strengthen and build community.

PP60 poster by Lux.

PP60 poster by Paul Chan/National Philistine.

OK, but back to the Gilmore Girls. For those of you unfamiliar, it was a show that aired on the now-extinct WB network from 2000 to 2006. Set in the quirky rural town of Stars Hollow, it was known for its rapid-fire dialogue, and beloved for the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. Rewatching it now, every character seems massively codependent and in desperate need of therapy, but that's neither here nor there. The Gilmore Girls was not where anyone would have expected Punk Planet to show up. But in fact it did, multiple times.

It all started in early 2001 (all of this is being written from memory because I no longer have access to the 24-year-old emails), when I got an email from Helen Pai, one of the producers of the show. They were introducing a new character and was wondering if they could use a copy of Punk Planet as set dressing. This wasn't uncommon back then. We'd get a few requests like that every year or so, for movies or TV. I'd always ask for more information, because I wasn't very interested in giving permission to things that were shitty. In the case of this one, I was familiar with the Gilmore Girls (I think maybe it was on before Buffy the Vampire Slayer), so I was mostly interested in the character. I wasn't particularly interested in giving a thumbs up if the new character was going to be a bad guy. I remember asking if he was a reader, lol. I can't remember what Helen said, but generally she was positive about him, so I agreed.

Jess debuts in Season 2, Episode 5. If you didn't know to look for it, you'd never know that blurry pink and blue shape to his left is PP45.

That character ended up being Jess, the nephew of the owner of the local diner, Luke. You can barely see the issue in his debut episode. He dumps it out of his duffle bag in an early scene and later sits next to it. It sort of hovers over a shoulder, out of focus. What's interesting to me now looking back at it is that it's PP45, September/October 2001, featuring a double cover odd-couple of Ralph Nader and Shellac. That issue would have been on newsstands in mid-August 2001. The episode aired on October 30th, 2001. That's a very tight production schedule! And, it also meant that they actually went out and bought the latest issue of the magazine instead of using one from earlier in the year.

Jess, wearing a Punk Planet T in Season 2, episode 15. He wore it the entire episode.

I wrote Helen back and thanked her. We ended up keeping in touch for quite a while. At some point I offered to send her over some of our merch, which is how later on that same season, Jess ends up wearing a bright red Punk Planet T-shirt for pretty much the duration of the entire episode. And at another point, Milo Ventimiglia, the actor that played Jess, ordered a big pile of magazines—I remember because Matt, our mailorder guy at the time, wrote "What's up, Gilmore Dude" on the outside of the package. The following season, Jess read We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews at his uncle's diner.

Jess reading the Punk Planet book, We Owe You Nothing, in the opening scene of Season 3, episode 4.

And then was the scene with issue 60 in season four of the show. It's not a quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot. Instead, they do a full tracking shot around Jess as he reads the issue in a park. There's George W Bush, clear as day on the cover, the fluorescent orange we used really shining through (production note: this is the only five-color cover we ever produced, flo orange on the front and CMYK for the ad on the back). The camera pans around to reveal the punchline: Jess is using the magazine as cover for the self-help books he's reading.

Punk Planet 60, without Jess.

By this point, nobody from the show was reaching out for permissions. I'd told them they could use what they want, when they want. So it came as a complete surprise to see this issue fill the screen. But also, looking back on it now, I'm struck by the issue choice. They could have chosen a different one. It was the most explicitly political cover we ran in Year 10. Yet here on full display—on this cheery WB show, a month before the 2004 general election would begin—was our warning that the time to act was now.

They knew what they were doing.

I write this today during the Economic Blackout, which has been hotly debated about whether it's going to make an impact, about whether it's enough. Of course it's not enough, but it's something. Action is what's important. Any protest movement is a series of acts. Every uprising is a series of moments. Every action is a series of choices. And we make those choices one by one, big ones and small.

But what is important is we make them.

What is important is we know what we are doing.

BAIL magazine, our short-lived (four issue) love letter to the art, music, and culture that grew out of skateboarding and Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, the first Punk Planet Book.

Year Ten Miscellany: This was the year that we expanded what we did at Punk Planet, launching the successful Punk Planet Books imprint with New York indie publisher Akashic Books and the less-successful BAIL magazine, a skateboard culture magazine that, frankly, was about a decade ahead of its time. Our first book from Punk Planet Books was Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned which was a runaway hit.

All of that extra stuff also meant expanding our staff, adding Anne Elizabeth Moore as an associate publisher, who came to us from the Comics Journal, and Cate Levinson as managing editor. In fact, looking at the masthead from Year 10, we're getting pretty close to the magazine's final form, with Mike Coleman moving from the design team to become art editor and Dave Hoffa joining to do mailorder (he'd later take over the reviews editor position from Kyle Ryan). What a crew.

Published February 28, 2025. |

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