Since their emergence in the late 1970s, punk movements—and their pursuant mythologies—have been serviced by an ever-expanding literature. This body of work includes insider accounts, in the form of fanzines, memoirs, and essay collections, as well as historical analysis from the multiple perspectives of subculture studies, media studies, art history, musical history, and design history.1 Punk, as a subject of academic research, has thus become an area of substantial interdisciplinary interest, bringing together scholarship equally concerned with politics, performance, modes of resistance, and more recently, nostalgia. Yet, formulaic narratives of anti-establishmentarianism, DIY (do-it-yourself) practices, and alternative communities remain common—a reflection of the movement’s many actor-historians whose accounts have become gospel within the punk canon. In histories of design, punk has been appraised primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon, with several large, hardback books devoted to reproducing posters and album covers in order to showcase the visual motifs—collage, tears, typographic anarchism—that have helped to categorize punk graphic design as an index of reproducible forms.2
Alex J. Todd (Sun,) studied this question.