There are, broadly speaking, two ways to listen to the 1968 song “Do It Again” by the Beach Boys. If you listen to it on its own, paying little attention to the rest of the Beach Boys’ discography up until that point, then all you’re getting is an effort that, though largely straightforward, is incredibly charming and compelling, a highlight of late-’60s pop-rock. When you start actually considering the lyrics, however, what you hear is a subtle death knell: with its lyrics about “the California girls and the beautiful coastlines,” the callback-heavy single is throbbing with a longing for youth – even though the oldest member of the band was just twenty-eight years old. Between 1962 and 1966, the Beach Boys functionally invented lyrics-driven surf rock (a genre theretofore dominated by instrumentals), ‘fell in line’ with more than a few ballads that, though traditional, were nonetheless musically transcendent, then essentially reinvented pop music. To a great degree, from a musical perspective, they shaped the course of the decade. And yet, there they were, having fallen from innovation to self-mythologization – the golden age depicted by “Do It Again” was only three years prior, but then it only took Adam and Eve a few minutes to be banished from the garden.

What happened during those years? To a great degree, the world did. Outside of in-group struggles, the rise of the New Left and anti-war movements and their representation in music—be it Bob Dylan or the nascent punk scene—began to leave little room for the false image of the clean-cut boys from Hawthorne. The result: first the half-hearted embrace of the new—see Mike Love, only singing part of the vocals for 1966’s “I Know There’s an Answer” after insisting on changing the lyrics to obfuscate references to psychedelics, and even then singing them with audible disdain—then, over time, reactionary nostalgic regressivism (if “Do It Again” has the musical tautness to carry it through, 1971’s “Disney Girls (1957)” is a work of pop-culture-inflected good-‘n’-wholesome fascism if there ever was one).

It is precisely this intersection of politics and art—this seamless transition from popular to populist—that the 1968 Dutch graphic novel Iris: A Novel for Viewers (written by Lo Hartog van Banda, drawn by Thé Tjong-Khing, and colored by Rudy Vrooman, recently published by Fantagraphics with a translation from the original Dutch by Laura Watkinson) seeks to comment on. To merely state that Iris was published in 1968, however, is not enough detail. Between the anti-war demonstrations and the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US and the student riots in France and West Germany, the world into which Iris was released in October was markedly different from the world in which it was pitched to its publishers the preceding January. There is, as a result, a real-time urgency to it, a response crafted on-the-go. 

Yet the graphic novel assumes neither a kneejerk reactionary-conservative stance nor a full solidarity with the leftist boom taking place around it. There is a skepticism here, not in the righteousness of the would-be revolution but in its utopian viability. Crucially, the book operates on the premise that the leftist movements have already, to a great degree, ‘won.’ Note the protesters in the background on page 8: a gaggle of aging men and women in military-like uniforms, some of them in wheelchairs or on crutches, bearing signs that read back to the bomb and ban sex – they are, physically and ideologically, decrepit, and thankfully outnumbered enough to be relegated to ambient noise. But, though this image of a defeated conservative contingent was certainly immensely cathartic at that particular moment in time, Hartog van Banda, Thé, and Vrooman engage ever more soberly, depicting the political changes not as a defeat of conservatism so much as a restructuring: nudity and sex may be freely discussed and depicted, for instance, but now hair is taboo instead. Capitalism, too, has not been defeated, only reshaped itself into a position of necessity, alive and well enough to necessitate an underground resistance movement.

To start with, the creators want us to view the titular Iris as little more than a willing victim: defined by her desire to be a famous singer, she doesn’t think twice when MG, a successful music producer (‘Dream King,’ in the book’s own lingo), notices her and wants to make her a star. The readers, of course, know better; just look at her first arrival at MG’s Dream Factory: there are no doors at the entrance, only prison-like grates parting at the center like teeth; the lobby is dungeon-black – yet merrily she ventures in. Likewise, when she is told that she would be the first pop star ever to perform without a wig, she takes the news on its face, too excited by her being chosen to ask questions (when a friend of hers, a fellow singer, does ask these questions, she is summarily executed).

In truth, Iris is not the protagonist of her own story so much as the sacrifice at its center, playing only a brief role within MG’s scheme; after duplicating her voice and image, he stages ‘concerts’ and mass-produces robotic dolls with her image, creating a persona without personhood, rendering the actual human Iris redundant. Her boyfriend, Mark, is the more heroic figure, as he emerges from precisely that authorial stance of skepticism in the system. Though supportive of his girlfriend and wanting only the best for her, he is detached enough from her ambitions to exercise critical thinking; it is he who teams with the resistance to try to rescue the swindled Iris, infiltrating MG’s base of operations not once but twice. He ultimately fails: Iris accedes, saying she will leave MG’s lock-and-key watch after her next performance, but MG manages to throw her into a state of functional catatonia. Here, one must point out, the team somewhat undercuts its own message: while lamenting the way the pop-cultural industrial complex robs its stars of their lives and personhoods, they fall into the convenient trapping of doing the same thing.

A ‘vibes-first’ work if there ever was one (which I mean in an affectionate way), much of the tone in Iris is established by the art by Thé and Vrooman, an aesthetic less of straightforward illustration so much as graphic design. The key principle at play here is not representation so much as a conscious, intentful arrangement, emphasizing its own departure from realism. Milton Glaser seems a natural comparison, as is the animation for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine which came out the same year: flat, elongated geometries and garish saturated color. There are no light-sources here, no external affects – color appears almost to burst outwards from within the forms. Consider the panel where Mark, having tried for the first time to rescue Iris, dives into the water and swims away from the Dream Factory: though water is drawn around him in warbling lines, Mark is not drawn to look underwater but rather pasted onto it; his clothes retain their popping yellow-orange-red palette, unaffected by the dim underwater lighting.

(Noteworthy, too, in this regard is the recurring scenario of Mark having sex in public urinals. Although from the exterior these are drawn as hardly bigger than the size of two telephone booths, they become much more expansive in the interior shots: suddenly there’s room for a bed, for stimulant dispensers, anything you could possibly want. Mostly this is achieved by their decision to render the walls of these public urinals completely black, even though the walls are perforated and there are clearly windows at the top – spatiality is obfuscated to the point of non-importance.)

This principle of garish, overpowering visual energy particularly shines in Thé and Vrooman’s sensory depictions. Traditionally, when representing music in comics, the default method has historically been some manner of dual orthography, combining musical notation (rarely, if ever, corresponding with the actual music at play) and transcribed sound effects (or lyrics, in lettering with a visual flourish); on occasion, the cartoonist will incorporate a divergence in texture as well. The orthographic approach is a flawed one, as it pursues clear literalist communication at the expense of energy and dynamism. In Iris‘ musical performances, by contrast, music is given a curious visual facet: there is no orthography whatsoever, only auras of flat color emanating outwards from the singer. Within the established aesthetic language of the story, the boundary between matter and energy is already blurred; at these moments of music, this in-between state becomes overpowering. (A similar effect is employed when an agent of the resistance cries out in pain after being shot, creating the striking—if likely unintentional—parallel between the literal assassination of the opposition and the more metaphorical annihilation of the individual artist; their vocalization is the same, and so is their suffering.)

The end of Iris faces head-on the corrosive pleasures of the collective false-image. Mark has managed to rescue Iris, but only after MG destroys her ability to distinguish reality from dream. To prevent her escape, the ‘Dream King’ controls her dreams to create an antagonistic reaction to Mark, which he portrays as the real villain, and she slips into a catatonic state. Mark never ceases to care for her, and he ultimately finds a perfect cure: an escape from the bustle of the city. The transition between the twelfth and thirteenth chapters is pointedly jarring: all of a sudden Iris is happy, healed, alive (and newly blonde); she and Mark are in an idyllic countryside commune, where everyone dances around and plays the Pan flute. We’re free! Flower Power has won! 

Think again. The commune is called Arcadia—as in et in _____, ego—and it is overseen by none other than MG, who has graduated to controlling not only the ebbs and tides of culture but, through his agents, the only-ostensibly-random whims of nature as well. The title of the thirteenth and final chapter is “All Dolled Up and Dancing to a Different Tune,” but, of course, that’s not true: the instruments may be different, but the tune is still the same. 

Iris: A Novel for Viewers opens on a 1970 preface from Lo Hartog van Banda, wherein he extols the virtues of the increased political engagement of the younger generation, as well as the enhanced objectivity of the visual image in comparison to the written word. Whether intentionally or otherwise, this is a clever sleight-of-hand; after this lull into a false sense of security, the ninety pages of the comic prove this point wrong at every turn. A graphic novel whose very existence is a game of point-counterpoint, it makes a bleak argument, and one that only increases in persuasiveness as time wears on: there is no escape from the system, and not even a so-called political awareness will do you any good; the system has poisoned your destination before you could reach it. But that’s okay, because, like Winston Smith, you, too, can fall in love with Big Brother. All it takes is the rhythm of a steel drum band – way down in Kokomo…