Early work from John Holmstrom, published the same year he founded PUNK magazine. At the time, Holmstrom was studying cartooning under Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman at the School of Visual Art and Holmstrom’s background helped define the look and feel of PUNK from the start. The first issue, with Holmstrom’s indelible Lou Reed cover, set the pace. As Jon Savage described: “Its cover story was an interview with Lou Reed about his current record METAL MACHINE MUSIC, but, instead of a photo, there was a wickedly accurate cartoon of Reed as metal man: the feature inside was not typeset but told in fumetti. ‘I wanted to see something new in comics,’ says Holmstrom, ‘it fitted the music. Johnny Ramone would always wear cartoon logo T-shirts.’ In issue number one of PUNK, the surrounding artwork is as important as important as Reed’s insults […] When the interviewers follow Reed down the block, there they are in cartoons. The effect was both immediate and distanced, a formal innovation on par with MAD magazine” (ENGLAND’S DREAMING p. 132). This fumetti technique (which Holmstrom almost certainly picked up from Kutzman’s HELP! magazine) would be utilized throughout PUNK’S tenure and was one of its signatures — elements all in evidence in this student publication. OCLC does not locate the title, though there is a copy among Holmstrom’s papers at Yale. A rare comic that served in part as the blueprint for the visual vocabulary of punk.
