The Symptom of Beauty Book

This is a fascinating collection. Rather than being conventional interviews, these pieces consist of commentaries by the artists themselves--Crumb, Spiegelman, Panter, Burns, Seth, Ware, Clowes, Brunetti, and Jaime Hernandez--on their work and influences, profusely illustrated with their art (finished, original, and in some cases everything down to the merest doodles) and with images of many of their key influences, so we learn about what has informed their work as well as about what they do. The book is interesting visually mainly for the insights it provides into process via the original art, sketches, mock-ups, doodles and so on included, stuff we don't usually get to see, very well reproduced and frequently in colour, though sometimes the size of the reproductions is a bit small (surprising in such an oversized book, but I guess limiting image size helped keep the page count down--and at over 300 pages, this is nevertheless a generously-sized book in all three of its dimensions). Seeing the images of what the artists themselves like and/or have been influenced by is very valuable here, especially when what we see is rare or unusual stuff (e.g. in the case of Seth, all the Doug Wright art--Wright has subsequently had a bunch of his stuff come back into print, largely thanks to Seth, but when this book came out, Wright was still languishing in obscurity). The artists' comments also often provide great insight into their processes, their self-conception, their main concerns, their aesthetic, and so on--some more than others, admittedly (the Charles Burns section, for instance, did not seem to me as revealing as most of the others). I enjoyed learning more about these cartoonists, even the figures about whom I knew little and in whose work I have little interest (e.g. Panter). I'm still not interested in Panter's work, but it was illuminating to get a direct sense of where he's coming from and how he conceives of his work. The book is marred somewhat by Hignite's . . . ornate? pretentious? (that seems harsh) florid? . . . writing style in the general introduction and the intros to the individual pieces, but fortunately these are all relatively short.