Image announces PUNKROCKPAPERSCISSORS, a tribute to the 80’s Punk Scene

Posted on October 14, 2014 in Comic News

Image Comics are really knocking it out of the park these days. Not content with attracting the top talents in the industry with their creator-owned ethos, they’re now branching into art of a different kind, a gorgeous compendium of Punk Rock flyers of the 80s.

It’s not too big a jump, with Lo-Fi geniuses like Raymond Pettibon’s comic-inspired style making every Black Flag cover a real thing of beauty.

A compilation from this golden age of underground art can only be a good thing, whether you’re a fan of the music or just interested in a time before social media, when a photocopier and a marker pen was all you needed to advertise a gig.

The book is the idea of one of the comics industry’s top colorists, Lee Loughridge (DEADLY CLASS, The Batman Adventures), who was a kid in the 1980s punk rock and hardcore scene, soaking in its unfiltered creative energy and DIY ethos — and collecting the flyers that promoted the shows.

Now, many of those flyers have been collected into a book, coming from Image Comics in November: PUNKROCKPAPERSCISSORS, a one-of-a-kind tribute to the punk scene that archives over 600 show flyers from Northeastern U.S. clubs such as the legendary CBGB, City Gardens, The Showplace, The Pipeline, The Pyramid, Wally’s Place, The Ritz, and more.

Reproduced in this 240-page, oversized book are flyers for some of punk rock’s most influential important bands, including Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, Agnostic Front, AOD, Fear, GBH, Murphy’s Law, Warzone, Kraut, and hundreds more. Also featured is a section dedicated to Black Flag and an “All Danzig” section, focusing on Samhain, The Misfits, and Danzig.

“I collected punk and hardcore flyers incessantly throughout the 1980s,” said Loughridge. “I got them at punk shows, at school, off of telephone poles, walls, and elders from the scene. For some reason I kept every last one of them.”

Adding to the collection were Loughridge’s friends Danny Sternaimolo, Art Ottimo, Joe Rosso and Dave Schwartzman, who contributed the flyers they collected.

“The bands and the art associated with these flyers completely shaped who I am today. From creating my own art and music, to never letting go of the punk rock ethics from those days — sometimes to a fault!” Loughridge added with a laugh. “This is from the scene for the scene.”

Raw and rough, reproduced in scratchy black-and-white on photocopiers and plastered on walls and windows, these hand-made advertisements represent the raucous world of punk hardcore in the 1980s. And now for the first time, with PUNKROCKPAPERSCISSORS, they’re being archived as an important record of an indelible creative movement.

PUNKROCKPAPERSCISSORS will be in comic book stores on November 5 and bookstores on November 18. It is available for pre-order now.

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