No laughing matter

Brendan Burford likes to say he created “Syncopated” because he wanted to do for comics what Joseph Mitchell did for journalism. After self-publishing three volumes over five years, Burford’s thoughtful artistic experiment -- I love that he calls them picto-essays -- has been picked up by Random House. “Syncopated” shows us the subtleties available in a medium best known for POW-BOP-BANG: “Syncopated” is the graphic narrative equivalent of slow food.

These hand-drawn, hand-lettered, black-and-white comics by a variety of writers teach the reader’s eyes to adjust from the glaring colors of bright sunlight to something more gentle. After reading through Nick Bertozzi’s picto-essays that quietly explain hay-baling -- “Nails were bitten watching the night skies looking for clues into the next days weather” -- we come across Tricia Van den Bergh’s wordless study of Washington Square Park at various times of day. (Like Mitchell, Burford has an abiding love of New York City.) The early pieces focus our eyes, showing us how the art deco park lights, drawn as orbs with radiating lines, glow in the suggested twilight. Buildings are both rectangular juggernauts and squarish phantoms. Despite its lack of human forms, the piece is completely satisfying.

Yet this collection contains more than stylized musings. Somewhat reminiscent of artist Kara Walker’s work (though far more rough), Greg Cook has taken material from the FBI’s oral histories of Guantanamo Bay and created a narrative, illustrated in silhouettes. We see a hapless figure beaten and forced to watch a woman squat over a Koran; then he lies frozen, shivering on the ground. “Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there” -- words without the human form would not convey the horror, but realistic images would be a further violation. Shadow figures may be the most dignified way to narrate torture.

Also touching is Paul Karasik’s short piece on psychologist Erik Erikson’s hugely influential theory of development. Karasik, who helped adapt Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” into a successful graphic novel, sandwiches Erikson’s famous Eight Stages between two disturbing stories from Erikson’s life. This causes us to question the psychological paradigm yet gives it a living, breathing context:

There are a few missteps. A series on subway buskers feels amateurish, and a narrative about development in Coney Island adds nothing new to familiar arguments. But what remains is a sense of something quiet that, unlike in other comics, does not foist itself upon you and yet has gravitas. The contemporary eye (your eye, my eye) is well-educated in the cartoon image. For three generations, we’ve stared at balloony, sketchy figures, learned to gather in their nuances. What we’re not used to is looking at them and finding depth. “Syncopated” is another step in the maturation of the art form. Reading it is like listening to a simple music and realizing how wonderful melody can be.