Iris: A Novel for Viewers

When thinking about Dutch comics, what immediately jumps to my mind is Janwillem van de Wetering. That's not because he's a more prominent personality in the field than, say, Joost Swarte – arguably the most well-known player in Netherlandic comics overseas and elsewhere – but with Murder By Remote Control in 1986 van de Wetering (already a famous crime writer) produced an outstandingly good comic in partnership with Paul Kirchner, an American. Famous for his short strip The Bus in Heavy Metal magazine, as well as Dope Rider, published in High Times, Kirchner's contributions to those magazines are odes to a counterculture that had long since gone.

However – and despite Maus being released that same year – Murder By Remote Control was around at a time when people still struggled desperately to justify their sequential arts reading habits to a world deeply convinced that the word itself was mightier than the picture (probably due to the long-lasting legacy of Calvinism still reaching into the late 1970s and early 1980s). In that era, an undertaking like Heavy Metal, an extension of its French mother Métal Hurlant, was a trailblazer for comics as an art form, but still struggled with a name that potentially choked off any highbrow expectations.

As far as descriptive labels go, there was the pretty precise term picto-fiction,  coined by the EC sales department, though it didn't have any long-lasting impact. But since it bears a similarity to its German ("Bildschriften") and Netherlandic ("Stripschriften") counterparts, and emphasizes that the writing is done WITH and BY pictures, I'd rather root for a definition like that than artificial and clumsy-sounding ones like, er, "graphic novel."

As for weighing in on the collaboration mentioned earlier, viewed by some as pioneering work and claiming to be free from the demands of the format as commonly practiced in the publishing business – strip, floppy, prestige – you may decide on your own to rather trust the judgment of former TCJ editor Joe McCulloch, or the late Gahan Wilson, relatively famous cartoonist, and occasionally reviewer of funny books at the no longer funny NYT. I, for one, appreciate both takes, as any citizen participating in a democracy should.

But – and this is the main reason for mentioning a work published twenty years from the one actually being reviewed – next to emphasizing eyes in their cover art, it's also another attempt by a Dutch to reclaim territory still unexplored by comics, as well as performing a trick still used today of getting a writer already successful on another soil.

So let's quickly jump back from the 1980s to the 1960s. An era where French enfant terrible and publisher Éric Losfeld described his publishing imprint as “Le Terrain Vague." It's a term "used by architects and urban planners to describe forgotten spaces which are left behind as a result of post-industrial urbanization. Interestingly, the term embodies two contrasting viewpoints: the first looks at these spaces negatively as representing disorder and disintegration; the second highlights their positive potential as free spaces in an urban environment that is becoming increasingly specialized,” according to Canadian artist Lisa Stinner-Kun.

Losfeld exposed his audience – grown up in the forgotten space of childhood – to the erotically laden space of adulthood. Minors were not the readership he aimed for with titles like Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella (1962/1964), Pierre Bartier's and Guy Peellaert's The Adventures of Jodelle (1966) or Phoebe Zeitgeist (1965) by Michael O’Donoghue and Frank Springer.

Consecutively, a similar debate in fashion arose, because some things never change, except for garments. But this is faux, as the French say, because "la mode" is always circling, never reaching the final frontier. While fashion is not the only keyword here to fuel any writing by this author with inspiration, you graciously might reconsider my remarks regarding the kinship between both arts, decorative or not, when I rode with TCJ's Best of 2020 cavalcade.

But why am I mentioning fashion? It's because Thé Tjong-Kingh, visual co-writer for the Dutch comic Iris from 1968, is apparently in debt to the line of books released/translated by Le Terrain Vague, and was an early adopter to fashion, as the afterword by Rudi Vrooman points out. Vrooman is also in charge of the new coloring for Iris, as it was initially only halfheartedly done in spreads between black and white, as well as colored pages, due to time restrictions.

Way before that, Tjong-Kingh had been hired for a strip set in the world of haute couture and prêt-à-porter, to be written by his later partner on Iris, Lo Hartog van Banda. During the run of Het Dagboek van Marion (The Diary of Marion) Tjong-Kingh also provided illustrations for several fashion magazines.

If you're flipping through the tripping color pages of Iris, which defines itself as a "novel for viewers," you'll almost inevitably take notice of the look of the main protagonist. She is usually attributed to swinging sixties supermodel Twiggy, but I would raise you a Jean Seberg and Mia Farrow on top. It's not just because of the short cut hair worn to easier blur her identity by changing wigs anytime you like, but probably because that "wig" is a component of the name "Twiggy" (and this is what makes the ability of critics to use the technique of close reading so important).

In the foreword, Lo Hartog van Banda acknowledges the conceptual setting of Iris was due to the growing influence of visuals, be it in movies, photos or comics and states: “The image is more objective than the word and thus generates independent thinking.” Imagine the wiggy procedure as a stand-in for gender change – you might remember that for a very long time the length of the hair defined the difference between the two genders.

Still, manipulation is always at stake. In Iris we have a Phil Spector-like producer type pushing female starlets to the top, and immediately throwing them away for the next season's collection, until they disappear out of view like Britney Spears.

To escape from these mechanisms that comply with consumer habits and go "d'accord" to capitalism, connections to the underground come in handy, and so, in an alliance with some revolutionary opposition, a male savior, Iris' boyfriend, has to free "his" girl from the diabolic machinations of MG, the so-called “Dream King," and his pop idol machine. To save her, the rescue squad literally has to crawl through tubes and whatnot.

With this way of intersectioning tendencies in pop culture, though striving for highbrow anointment while simultaneously aiming for a broader target group, getting in line was pre-programmed. Iris, being highly influenced mainly by art created by Pellaert with its curvy flow, and therefore remaining as a kind of cashing in on those developments, mirrors capitalism by criticizing it just mildly, and is not that far away from the same mechanisms utilized by an ever-hungry pop music factory. It uses a model that proved successful before, and comes up with a diluted derivative.

That makes up for a wonderful lesson in forming a fluid narrative driven by movement as only comics – and probably Mark Z. Danielewski – can. And this is where the free flowing lines and flat colors often make the strongest impression: born out of wavy hair, directly lifted from art nouveau styles, or emerging as a continuation from a pinstripe suit reaching for a fleeing object of desire (which can be read closely as an overtake of subculture by a greedy industry if not the other way around). The whole style also feasts heavily on pop art mannerisms, which itself is rooted in popular media like comics, mass culture's watershed between high and low, and thus another circle completes.

An era propagating freedom for all, which means having sex anytime and anywhere, only gets protested by elderly citizens in a city, and their placards are no more than an odd flavor drowned out by the many signs perpetually advertising sensations galore. Meanwhile, the plot of Iris, dedicated to showing things to make you see, is only delivering this service to some, i.e. having sex freed from any responsibility for males, as an example.

Which makes Iris' plotting a tad bit translucent. With all the fucking aside, who will take care of the kids afterwards? Surely comics won't, because they aren't just for kids anymore.

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