Punk Rock in Comics!

Pop Rock en BD

by Thierry Lamy, Nicolas Finet

Here is the can't-miss overview of the punk rock scene from its early inception in the seventies in New York and the UK. Includes chapters on The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and more. Punk was also the flex point for women in rock that paved the way for the Riot Grrrl movement like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Blondie, The Runaways, Patti Smith and The Slits. Flashing the finger against the slick corporate rock of the '70s, punk was faster, messier, and louder than anything before it. Covered here with the same raw energy, look, and attitude as the music itself!

Genres: Music, Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, History, Comics

176 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2024

Reviews

[Larakaa]

3.75 stars

The history of punk is vast and diffuse, but this book manages to find a way to navigate it. The visual style changes with every chapter, which is a fitting choice. Of course, this book can't show and name everything but it still shows what punk has been.

[Jaime K]

I like the premise of this comic. Starting with the pre-punk era of the late ‘60s and diving into different bands and trends beginning in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, this comic covers a lot of the beginnings of the punk genre in its different guises.

Each “era” is drawn by a different artist; and I admittedly don’t like the art of most of them. They’re then followed by a blurb that spans a page or two of the band/content. I would have preferred if the written information was given before the comic because often times the comics discussed things that I had no clue about and needed to look up, but we’re explained in the prose.

I like that the book also covers the relationship between punk and reggae/ska, and rock.

I’m surprised at how much it’s covered, though I would have preferred better cohesionand having this as a book vs a comic. I haven’t heard of more than half the bands highlighted here. And, even though I know many people met their end because of drugs, the different reasons why bands broke up or people died is really sobering when hearing more details.

I love the collection of suggested listening, reading, and watching at the end.

[Mike S.]

A 3.5⭐ rounded down. There's a little too much redundancy throughout the narrative arc, a couple head-scratching inclusions (feels like a cred-grab), and a general over-valuing of the British wave (and especially the Sex Pistols). Look, in spite of what my coworkers might argue, I wasn't alive for the first wave and didn't have much awareness of punk rock until the 1992-1994 time period, at which point I became an obsessive. This is a nice little volume with varying quality levels that I think a middle or high school me would have devoured. The selected discography and reading lists at the end have a lot of great suggestions and overlap to what I'd hand a kid that genuinely wanted to know the history and standouts, though, so I think there is some real potential utility to this graphic novel and I'm glad it's in my little public library. I hope it serves as an info map for a future rocker or two.

[Nicole Lajambe]

This was a Goodreads book that I won.
The artist that did the illustrations are amazing.
Loved how they show the music over the years.
Since this isn’t my actual genre of books that I read, I can say that they did an amazing job in this book.

[Emily Posthumus]

Nice, in-depth, but really only covers very early punk, ending around the Dead Kennedys and mostly focused on Britain.

[McKenzy Hupke]

this is gonna be a DNF for me, i thought i was more into music to want to go deeper into this but i just have no interest in this genre i think 🤷🏻‍♀️