Review: ‘Syncopated’ edited by Brendan Burford
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95
For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.
That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[The
Big Skinny]]]) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.
If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.
Some of the memoirs are very personal, like Sarah Glidden’s
account of a trip to China with her father to adopt the baby who will be her
new sister, and Nick Bertozzi’s memories of haymaking as a teenager. Several
more are more meditative works, closer to fiction, such as Richard and Brian
Hames’s thoughts on evening fly-fishing, and Paul Hoppe’s piece on the atmosphere
and life of Coney Island. None of them, luckily, are as navel-gazing as the
popular conception of memoir comics; these are all pieces about something other
than the cartoonist and his/her neuroses.
The histories tend to be more pointed, from Nate Powell’s
spotlight on the shameful massacre of Tulsa’s black community about a century
ago to Greg Cook’s shadow puppets reenacting excerpts from the FBI’s reports on
prisoners’ treatment at Guantanamo Bay. (Rina Piccolo’s lovely piece about the
rise of postcards in the late 19th century forms the bridge between
these two clumps of stories; it’s casually personal but still focused outward,
on the postcards themselves and what they can tell us – and have told Piccolo –
about the long-dead people who sent and received them.)
Some of the histories feel random in their specificity –
particularly “[[[Boris Rose: Prisoner of Jazz]]]” by Burford and Jim Campbell, and Paul Karasik’s “[[[Erik Erikson]]],” which each show high points from the life of an interesting, little-known person. (Alec Longstreth has a similar piece, on the creator of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but comics have so long championed the tormented oddball, the scientists “laughed at by the university,” that it felt more at home. Or perhaps it was just the third similar profile, and so it more obviously fit in Syncopated.)
The best story here is Powell’s; his art evokes the fire and
smoke of the Tulsa riots of 1921 amazingly well in black and white, and he
tamps down the natural anger at this horrible crime to present it in full,
damning detail. But several other pieces are nearly as strong in quieter ways –
Piccolo’s “Penny Sentiments” and Burford’s own concluding “An Encounter With Richard
Peterson,” for example. And there’s nothing here that’s embarrassing or amateurish;
it’s all of a solidly professional level, and shows a wide range of interests
and ideas.
This Syncopated, if I
understand this correctly, is continuing a series of anthologies of the same
title self-published by Burford starting in 2002, but contains entirely new
work. I hope this incarnation of Syncopated will continue and grow – and that, maybe, some of
the stories from the self-published version will come out to a wider audience
eventually.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly
twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book
Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics
for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly
book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to
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