Syncopated Volume 3
Syncopated Volume 3 edited by Brendan Burford. Syncopated Comics, 2007. $15.
Anthologies are by their nature hit and miss. One can only judge them by how much the good outweighs the bad (or boring). Syncopated Volume 3 is a mix of the good and the so-so, nothing outright bad, but much that could have been better executed. The anthology is themed around “first-person reportage” and “first-person journalistic essays,” non-fiction. This genre is still rather rare in comics, where fiction (and genre fiction at that) predominates, so the anthology has a certain interest before one even opens the book.
Burford starts out the book with a three page comic called “Seaport.” Spurred on by his reading of Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel”, Burford visits Fulton Fish Market and the surrounding seaport, discovering that the market is gone and the area has become commercialized. End of story. This comic displays a problem that occurs a few times in this anthology: a preponderance of words linked to pointless images. In a story that could show us images of the old market compared to its current site, or show us the changes instead of telling us about them, Burford wastes a number of opportunites and gives us: 6 panels featuring his comic proxy with the same identical facial expression in each (sad), a number of unidentified buildings seen from a worm’s eye view past their roofs into the sky. A panel with text about the relocated fish market does show us a few closed up stalls, but a panel about the mall shows nothing. For a story about change and in particular, the change of location, setting, and architecture, there is little to be seen of this. It’s as if Burford paced out his text into panels and then didn’t know what to draw in many of the panels.
Dave Kiersh’s “Sidney Peterson or Peter, For Short” tells the story of his relationship with his grandmother’s friend Peter who turns out to be an experimental filmmaker of the past. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stories in this genre, the discovery of someone’s famous past. Kiersh’s is neither exemplary nor poor, though I wish I had gotten more of a feel for what Peterson’s films were like, so I could gain my own respect or interest in him.
Rina Piccolo’s “Overhead Conversations” tells us of Piccolo’s interest in overheard fragments of conversations. Nothing here adds anything to an already done concept.
“A Tugboat Graveyard” is a written piece by Burford with two illustrations by Gary Gianni. Unlike Burford’s other stories in this volume, this piece cries out for illustration. It has the narrative of his search for the location of the graveyard on Staten Island, and numerous opportunities for interesting visuals: the bridge to Staten Island, the houses high on the hills, the junkyard where Burford is denied direct access to the graveyard, the tugboat graveyard itself, and the nearby human graveyard. This could be an visually attractive and narratively interesting comic, but instead we get a few pages of text that leave me wondering, “what did it look like?”
Nick Bertozzi’s “Sir Ernest Shackleton in The Voyage of the James Caird” is the highlight of the anthology. Bertozzi tells us about Shackleton and his men’s attempt to get to South Georgia Island in a dinghy, 800 miles from Elephant Island where they are stranded. This all takes place in the far south Atlantic, so ice, storms, and cold are all issues. Bertozzi contrasts large unframed panels with small enclosed panels to emphases both the vast space of the empty sea and the tight space of the dinghy. Bertozzi’s use of many thin lines conveys the wind, water, dirt, and ice of the setting and gives the comic a gritty look. This is an well done historical narrative that feels complete and provides enough context to make the plight of the characters comprehensible.
On the other hand, “T.R. and the Thieves” by Jim Campbell is a historical vignette about Teddy Roosevelt that fails to feel with complete or historical comprehensible. Roosevelt and his friend’s boat is stolen by thieves, whom they chase down and take to jail. I have no idea where this story takes place as we only get a date (1886). I feel like I am missing context, and it reads as an extracted part of something larger, making it a rather unsatisfactory story.
Greg Cook’s “My Dorchester Neighbors” is another standout piece. Cook uses stark silhouetted images to tell the story of soldiers in Iraq and their deaths or injuries. The simple art is highly effective in conveying these stories with a certain distance. It gives these stories a sense of banality, almost, which in itself is a scary thing. These deaths and injuries have become part of the everyday for us, as we constantly hear of more deaths on the radio, tv, or newspaper. I don’t know if that is Cook’s point here, but it is what I take from it. I really like the silhouettes, which are effectively contrasted at times (like explosions) with the use of black shapes and white negative space to create a reverse effect.
Four pages of Tom Devlin’s “Freehand and Nib Doodles” seem out of place in this anthology. They don’t fit in with the theme and aren’t interesting in themselves.
“When ‘29 Came” by John Martz is a story of Martz’s grandmother during the Depression in Canada as told to him when he was interviewing her for a school project at age 14. It’s labeled “part one” and in six pages there isn’t much to say. It reads like an introduction to something longer that may or may not pan out to an interesting and engaging narrative. I’m not a fan of the big headed cartoon style.
“The Williamsburg/Greenpoint Waterfront Discussion” by Paul Hoppe is what Burford’s “Seaport” could have been. Hoppe discusses the changing landscape of the two named Brooklyn neighborhoods, using mostly a single square image per page with a couple lines of text below it. The images seem to be pen and ink landscape or life drawings and in their sketchy style provide a greater sense of reporting an event at the scene. In two cases where explanation is more important than image he uses square blocks of text instead of images, but for the most part there is a pleasant co-existence of text and image, where they work together to provide more than either could singly. Sometimes this connection is literal at others times metaphorical, as in this image:
An excellent example of reportage in text and image, another highlight for the book.
Susie Cagle’s “206 Classon Avenue, Beginning to End” is a short essay on the history of a building where Cagle briefly lived. It also includes an illustration of the building with numbered notes of events or things mentioned in the essay. I really don’t have anything to say about it.
Burford’s four page “Gotham” ends the anthology with a story on why New York City is called “Gotham”. There is more relevant imagery and narrative in this comic than “Seaport” but it also has a large number of panels that are there for their text narration and not the images. Burford keeps showing us his comic proxy sitting in his chair with the book he is discussing, showing us the same identical facial expression in each one and the occasional gesticulation. This extra level of narration, Burford showing us “Burford” telling us the story that he is then showing us, seems completely unnecessary to the comic. Perhaps if it were just an opening and closing panel, but we get 11 panels of this in a story that only takes up 23 panels total. This is case where Hoppe’s tactic (see above) of just putting a large block of text instead of an image would have been helpful in streamlining the story.
This displays an issue that should be considered in the genre of comics reportage. Conventional reportage offers only a few images and lots of text. Analysis, arguments, and other elements of reportage are in many cases difficult to convey with images, or at least narrative images of the conventional sort (what about graphs, charts, maps, etc.?). I think comics reportage may require thinking outside the constraints and conventions of fictional narration. Non-fiction in comics (particularly autobiography) is often broken down and drawn in a similar way to conventional fictional narrative, and that is probably to its detriment.
All in all this is an interesting anthology with a theme that deserves more attention and attempts. There are a few really strong pieces here that make it worth reading and many of the problematic pieces at least provided this reader with food for thought on the genre of comics reportage.
Tags: anthologies, nonfictioncomics
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