Cometbus is arguably the most important self-published document of the end of the millennium American punk rock landscape

~ Soral X ~

First, a confession: Aaron Cometbus was a sometime pen pal and full-time hero of mine during the 1990s and early 2000s when I, like so many others, left a claustrophobic hometown for the San Francisco Bay Area, seeking, in large part, the camaraderie and ethic of the punk scene described in the pages of Aaron’s eponymously titled zine, Cometbus.

The American punk scene was primarily offline and highly regional. For people disconnected geographically but holding shared ideals and tastes, and especially away from more urban centers, zines acted as a locus of community and connection. Authors regularly swapped writing and art, and long-running correspondences were born that sometimes morphed into real world friendships.

Aaron published the first issue of Cometbus in 1981, and issues continued to be released until 2020. It centered around Aaron’s gift for storytelling and character observation, constructing a cosmology of punk houses, lesser-known scenes, and the eccentric characters and contributors who peopled the Cometbus landscape. For myself, reading the world he described punctured my isolation and beckoned me with the “another world is possible” romance of its stories.

Cometbus manifested a particular set of analogue aesthetics and postures – both visually and in the suggested attitudes of its first person narrator. Those aesthetics were represented by a minimalist style which foregrounded the physicality, labour and devotion of writing, through Aaron’s characteristic squared and loping hand.

Though he has always maintained that the pages of Cometbus were fictional, his stories nevertheless shaped the East Bay punk scene, both to outsiders and via a resonance between the community and its pages. Cometbus is arguably the most important self-published document of the end of the millennium American punk rock landscape. And while later issues serve more explicitly as an autopsy of punk, Cometbus #54, In China With Green Day, functions as a tacit epilogue to the era of Bay Area punk from which the band and Aaron Cometbus both emerged.

Following Green Day’s 2010 world tour, #54 marked two decades since they’d initially burst onto the scene – and at least a decade past what seemed like its expiration date. That scene was in many ways written into existence for the wider US punk rock audience via the pages of Cometbus. The narrative of #54 will likely evoke a sense of déja vu for readers familiar with his oeuvre or the scene generally.

It opens with Aaron on a plane, in first class, with the band. That context articulates a distance that had grown between him and people once considered close friends; it is also a reckoning. While superficially an engaging tour diary, it is also Cometbus’s exploration of deeper themes like class, friendship, and the differing ways individuals related to, conserved, or abandoned the ethics of the Bay Area punk scene.

Ostensibly it’s about the band itself, and indeed the familiarity between Cometbus and his old friends lends a descriptive intimacy which will be irresistible to longtime fans. Aaron has an uncanny ability to notice people, laying bare the quirks and workings of a personality in just a sentence or two. Of his old friend and original Green Day drummer Al Sobrante, Aaron writes: “He made punk idealism seem like a parlor game for people who have other options.” Ouch.

But it is via this painful exposure of Al that Aaron is able to describe the class dynamic which affected Green Day’s other members, noting they did not have the comfort of “other options.” Aaron wrestles with his friends’ fame and the decisions that led them there, but never settles on just one version of the story. Instead, he weaves complexity into the stories he relates. Never one to be satisfied with a simple summation, the main players of #54 are depicted as a continually shifting judge and jury in the mental courtroom of Aaron’s mind.

In spite of the deeper conflicts at play, In China With Green Day retains Cometbus’s signature joyful and knowingly indiscrete style. Readers are treated to a panoply of comic and touching stories from both the tour and the Bay Area scene’s early years. Aaron’s proximity lends a level of detail that invites readers to feel as if they, too, were there.

Reading in 2025, it is the elegiac aspect to the writing which stands out. Some of the concerns which dominated the punk scene of the ’90s (“selling out”) could seem prosaic now. But what was obsessed about then resonates in a new way now.=

The question of how to make life within the framework of personal and political ethics, and whether it is either viable or useful to maintain friendships with people who have chosen differently, is still prescient. Many of Cometbus’s original readership are now middle aged, and reflecting on who we are – or were – through the lens of Aaron’s own evaluation is a journey worth taking.

Aaron Cometbus, In China With Green Day, PM Press (2025) 192 pages, ISBN: 979-8887441382, £13.99

This article first appeared in the Winter 2025/26 issue of Freedom Journal