Artistic Diversity & the Internet

I love the band The Cars, and recently read the following in an interview with Ric Ocasek:

AVC: It's hard to pinpoint any hard influences on The Cars besides old-time rock and maybe krautrock. What were you listening to then?

RO: As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too. Back then, there wasn't a lot of press on bands. There was Creem and Rolling Stone, and that was about it. There certainly wasn't the Internet. You would stay in your basement and create something and then come out. You didn't have anything to rub off on. You didn't know what the band down the street was doing, because you couldn't look it up, and you couldn't see it on TV. I think people tended to come out with things that were different because they weren't influenced by their environments as much. I find these days, you almost have to force yourself to stay in a vacuum to become different—if you really want to be different. Maybe you have to have something different inside of you as well.

This got me thinking about how this applies to art and cartooning. The internet has made available such a wide variety of material, but instead of creating diversity, it seems to have created a kind of "blandization" or homogenization in art, music, movies, and culture in general.

What do you think?

Milt Gross Dream Book

The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story by Craig Yoe is my choice for book of the year.

Being obsessed with cartoons most of my life, I've often had dreams about finding wonderful cartoon books that never existed. I imagine Craig has had those dreams too, and he's now doing us all a huge favor by making them a reality.

When I first discovered Milt Gross at Spumco almost 20 years ago, I went on an obsessive search for all of Milt Gross' comic book stories, digging through dusty boxes at comic conventions and bookstores. His stories were usually well hidden in the backs of obscure old humor comics, and I had to open a lot of taped comic bags to search the contents, enduring the withering stares of the snotty dealers. When I found a new Gross story it was a real thrill, and I would then take them to work and enlarge them on the WB color copier, and put them into sleeves and binders in my first attempts to make my own cartoon books for myself and friends. Craig has saved you all that trouble and produced the ultimate Milt Gross book. He even found some stories I've never seen before.

I'm not going to go into the comics themselves- you either love Milt Gross or don't get it, but the book itself looks, feels, and even smells great. It really is a treat to hold. The reproduction, binding, layout and supplemental materials are all PERFECT. And I can't believe how cheap it is- $39.99, or $29.19 at Amazon.

Thanks, Craig!