Punk Planet Year Eleven, issues 62-67.

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 | Year Eleven

Year 11 was all about growth for Punk Planet. Or, more precisely, it was about growth for Independents Day Media, the company I founded a year earlier. After years of the magazine being nothing but a flimsy sole proprietorship (literally I just placed a classified ad in a few newspapers saying I was "doing business as Punk Planet"), it went legit in 2003. Well, not that legit, the owner was still just me but at least there was a legal structure to separate me from the magazine. But instead of simply calling the company "Punk Planet Inc," I decided it was a good opportunity to give it a name that could apply to more things. In Year 11 it was time to start doing those "more things."

Honestly, this history is a little messy, because it actually starts in Year 10, in 2003. Specifically it starts at the newly-opened skate park at Wilson and Montrose Harbor in Chicago. By this point, Punk Planet had moved into a cavernous warehouse space in Ravenswood that we shared with Jay Ryan's The Bird Machine print shop. A mix of PP people and Bird Machine people started meeting up to skate in the morning before work (and also before people that knew what they were doing were at the park). Most mornings it was us—all variations of "too old for this shit"—and some moms with their kids. The best skater among us was Michael Coleman, a longtime member of PP design crew who had recently become the Art Editor of the magazine (he'd actually go on to work as an art director at Girl Skateboards after PP ended). Occasionally another Old would show up and we'd knowingly nod at them.

The covers of Bail 01, 02, and 04. Unfortunately, I'm not able to find 03, which featured the Beastie Boys on the cover.

That kicked off a conversation between Michael and myself: How did our childhoods spent skating influence the lives we lead now? And more importantly than us, how did that reflect on the larger culture of artists and musicians and makers of all stripes who had one foot in skating and another somewhere else? To me, there was something really interesting in that question.

Around the same time this was happening—again, this is messy and my timeline might be a little jacked—I was introduced to the Joe Meno, a novelist in Chicago, through our mutual pal Meghan Galbraith (RIP) who worked at the bagel shop at the end of the alley from the PP office. From that introduction, two incredible things happened.

The opening spread of the Jason Lee interview from Bail 01, type and photos by Andy Mueller.

A beautiful spread for an interview with the skateboard design company Dreamland, featuring stunning script by Evan Hecox.

The opening spread for 04's cover interview with Christian Hosoi featuring type by Justin Fines.

The first thing is Joe started meeting up with all of us at the skate park, and pretty soon he was involved in that conversation Mike and I had already been having. From that conversation, a new magazine was hatched: BAIL, about skateboard culture. I'd act as publisher instead of editor this time, with Mike and Joe taking a dual editor role. Andy Mueller, who did design work under the name The Quiet Life, designed the logo and the first issue's headline typeface (each issue had a head typeface designed by someone different), and Nadine Nakanishi, who had just moved to the States from Switzerland to intern at Punk Planet, signed on as a designer. The first issue featured actor Jason Lee on the cover (who's recently back on screens after a long time away in the excellent murder mystery show The Residence). The second and fourth issues featured skate legends Steve Caballero and Christian Hosoi, and the third issue featured none other than the Beastie Boys (somehow I'm missing that issue). It was an incredible magazine, tying together so much amazing art and music and culture that grew out of or alongside skating. It was also expensive to produce, an entirely new industry for us to try and break into, and we were only able to produce four issues. But man, what issues they were. Still some of my favorite stuff I've ever done.

The first three titles from Punk Planet Books.

The next thing ended up having more staying power. While we were working on BAIL, Joe had been working on a novel. He'd previously published two books with a major publisher, and had been jaded by the experience. With this new book, he was considering self-publishing because it was really personal and he didn't want a big publisher to fuck it up. Joe brought by a big envelope with his manuscript inside, I read it over a weekend and then suggested that instead of him self-publishing, we could put it out. After the success of 2001's We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews (note, all book links are affilate links), I'd had a casual offer from Akashic Books' Johnny Temple to start an imprint with his press. And suddenly, here was Joe with an amazing book and... it all just sort of clicked. Joe's manuscript became Hairstyles of the Damned, the first book from Punk Planet Books (Meghan, who introduced us, was our pink-haired cover model). Our second book, a nonfiction memoir/manifesto from Positive Force DC's Mark Andersen, All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion, was released at the same time. Hairstyles became a phenomenon, selling tens of thousands of copies and launching Joe's career, cementing Akashic's place as a leading indie, and ensuring that Punk Planet Books could continue putting out amazing books, including the moving memoir Lessons in Taxidermy by Bee Lavender that was released at the tail end of Year 11.

While all this was happening, we were continuing to put out Punk Planet every-other month, and experimenting with things like PP/AP, Punk Planet Artist Prints, a limited-run T-shirt subscription with shirts designed by underground artists. It was such an incredible period of experimentation and growth where it felt like the team that had assembled around all the various things we were doing was working together so smoothly and we were executing on everything at such a high level. It's kind of astounding now looking at just how much we did in that timeframe.

But: Even as we were growing in all directions, looking back over it now, I can see that there are cracks in the foundation. Page counts in Punk Planet were going down. We started running a regular ad asking people to directly support the magazine beyond just subscriptions (we called it "community supported journalism," a concept that wouldn't find footing in traditional journalism for a decade or more). And we pitched magazine subscriptions hard, complete with a blow-in subscription envelope you could mail back. Money, which was never abundant, was clearly getting tighter. It's interesting having the perspective now of knowing what's coming, it's clear that the storm that will come crashing down on us in years 12 and 13 was already starting to gather. It's been a very long time, but even now seeing these little hints at the bad times to come... I hate it.

The three covers for the final Art & Design theme issue.

PPY11 miscellany: Most of this essay was not about Punk Planet, but Year 11 was actually really solid. Standout issues include a cover interview with Fred Armisen right after he was announced for the cast of Saturday Night Live. When the issue came out, he bought the office like 10 pizzas as a prank on a day that almost no one was around. I ended up taking some over to Touch and Go Records whose office was across the train tracks from us. This year also featured the third and final installment of our Art & Design theme issues with a triptych of covers designed by Converge's Jake Bannon, Chicago multimedia artist Christa Donner, and poster artist Tara McPherson. Somehow, impossibly, on top of all of this happening in Year 11, I also had a brand-new baby, who quickly became a regular at the office because we couldn't afford childcare.