Punk Planet Year Twelve, issues 68-73.

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 Twelve

Memory is a real son of a bitch. I thought I remembered the last years of Punk Planet vividly. The pain still feels fresh to me, so fresh that I've been dreading writing about years 12 and 13, the years we fought to keep the magazine alive until, finally, we couldn't. And yet my memory of that time—that after years of working with a newsstand distributor, their financial mismanagement put our survival into jeopardy—was proven to be incorrect with the very first issue of Year 12.

"This issue marks a new beginning for the distribution of this magazine," I wrote in the introduction to issue 68. "After almost 10 years of working with Mordam Records as our exclusive national distributor, we have moved our newsstand and bookstore distribution to the fine folks at BigTop Newsstand Services, the distribution arm of the not-for-profit Independent Press Association." I went on to explain that we would continue to work with Mordam—who had recently merged with another indie distributor, Lumberjack, to become a much larger distro—for record store distribution but that "now we get the best of both worlds: the best music distributor in the country getting Punk Planet into record stores and the best newsstand distro getting us onto magazine racks."

The opening spread from Christopher Cardinale's Hurricane Katrina sketchbook in PP73.

I remember this move. Mordam was changing dramatically with the merger with Lumberjack, and it felt like their interest in dealing with bookstores plummeted. At the same time, having been around for well over a decade now, we were heavily engaged in the larger world of independent publishing, including being members of the Independent Press Association (IPA), so moving to a reliable, nonprofit distro whose entire expertise was getting indie magazines onto shelves seemed like the smart thing to do.

But memory is weird, because I could have sworn that move happened years earlier, and that the trouble to come was after a period of everything just working the way I outlined in that optimistic introduction to issue 68.

Which is why I literally gasped when I read what I wrote just three issues later, in PP71:

"In late October we received a letter from our main distributor informing us that they were having cash flow problems and that our payment—along with the payments of many other great independent magazines—would be delayed for an undisclosed amount of time. The letter couldn't have come at a worse time, as we'd amassed a good amount of debt this year and we were expecting those payments to pay it off."

A spread from Cardinale's sketchbook focusing on the volunteer effort.

Three issues. Six months. That was all the time we had.

We moved most of our distribution to the IPA and, six months later, they weren't paying. In fact, knowing how long distribution payments take, it's likely we never got a single payment before we got this letter. We had no savings, no cushion. I remember walking into a bank and asking for a loan and getting literally laughed out of the building. This should have been a mortal blow.

In my mind, this took years. But it didn't. It was so fast.

Of course, when you're living through something, you can't see the end. When I wrote that optimistic note in PP68 I did not know about the letter that would come six months later. And, even as I penned that introduction in PP71 talking about the letter, I did not know that, barely more than a year after that, we'd be done.

Looking across issues like this, it feels so fast. But the reality is that living through it, we were drowning in slow motion.

And we didn't even know.

A collection of sketches of people Cardinale met at the Common Ground free clinic.

Even if we did though, I'd like to think that we'd fight the same way. We reached out to our community and we asked for help. This was in 2006, long before crowdsourcing became a thing. There were no websites we could point people to. We just had to put out a plea and give an address and hope. And people sent money, in $5s and $10s and $20s. Bands and labels held small benefit shows and sent checks. They added up. We were able to dig out of enough debt to keep going.

Dollar by dollar, issue by issue, our community got us through through Year 12. We would have died right there and then without it.

It's a lesson I still hold on to, now, 20 years later: community is everything; community can get you through anything.

I write this post on Donald Trump's 100th day in office. 100 destructive, awful days. Days that very much feel like drowning in slow motion. And once again it's community that will get us through. It's all we have. It's all we need.

The opening spread from the interview with Miranda July in PP71.

We completely revamped our reviews section in PP70, this is the start of the music section.

Year 12 Miscellany: Despite all the turmoil that largely defined the business end of Year 12, we actually did a lot of really incredible work. Most notably, we completely redesigned and reimagined our enormous review section into something that was both more approachable, more personal, and allowed our dozens of reviewers more freedom to highlight their favorites. But Year 12 also featured some really incredible interviews: with artist, author, and filmmaker Miranda July who was just breaking through at the time, with Dischord Records' Ian MacKaye on his project The Evens and why he always wanted to be defined by what he's doing instead of what he's done, and with punk legend Bob Mould about growing older and wiser. But the real standout from this year was an illustrated sketchbook from artist and author Christopher Cardinale documenting his time helping New Orleans dig out from Hurricane Katrina. Some of those illustrations accompany this post.