The Best of PUNK Magazine by John Holmstrom and Bridget Hurd, with a foreward from Deborah Harry (yes, the singer from Blondie) and Chris Stein (co-founder of Blondie), is a compilation of the best articles and artwork from the magazine, and it opens with a fun depiction of New York City — “The PUNK Map of N.Y.C.: For jerks who just don’t know their way around.” The drawings of the rivers and the streets and the realistic, and yet, out there cartoons are likely to generate smirks, if not genuine smiles.

As someone born in the late 1970s, but in love with punk music and Blondie, this collection is something that provides not only more background about the emergence of punk, but also the whimsical fun and sort of not-a-care-in-the-world feel of the genre. PUNK magazine had a lot to live up to as the voice of 1970s New York, but it also had a lot to break away from in terms of what was expected of a music magazine. Clearly, PUNK was a magazine dedicated to snarkiness in all its forms — visual and textual — and it worked well. It was gritty, it was real, and the glamor was no where in its photos or its comics, but that seems to be why the magazine stood out. There was a whole lot of youthful exuberance in the beginning of this magazine as nicknames were handed out and spaces were renamed — like the PUNK Dump.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/03/the-best-of-punk-magazine-by-john-holmstrom-... ( )