Montreal-based comic artist Julie Doucet began self-publishing her zine, Dirty Plotte, in 1987. Three years later, it became the foundation stone of the influential Canadian comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly.
With his lack of inhibition and disdain for pat categorization, Plotte—the title is Québécois slang for vagina—became a source of inspiration for other comic book creators. “She has this kind of freedom in her work, writing about her experiences and things that seemed taboo,” said artist and cartoonist Jessica Campbell. ‘Rave’, Campbell’s queer coming-of-age comic, was made possible in part by the permission she found in Doucet’s illustrations.
But being a woman in a male-dominated industry was exhausting, and the painstaking work of creating brutally revealing comics was neither easy nor lucrative. In the early 2000s, Doucet retired, much to the surprise of her fans. She decided she would no longer draw comics; maybe she wouldn’t sign at all.
For a while she went back to printmaking, her specialty as an art student. “But pretty quickly,” Doucet said in a phone interview, “I went back to using words in everything I was doing.” Meanwhile, Drawn & Quarterly released “Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet”. Here, in a handy two-part, was her vulgar, autobiographical, fantastical explosion of gender, self-expression and identity performance.
It was while “Dirty Plotte” was being prepared for publication that Doucet revisited her diaries and recalled a brief affair with a man she calls the Hussar. The result is “Time Zone J,” published April 19 by Drawn & Quarterly, which sees Doucet return to comics after a two-decade hiatus.
Not that she necessarily intended to return; it was mainly a matter of having exhausted all other possible means of telling the story. “I tried to tell it in cut words, I tried to put it in the past – it happened in the ’80s, but I tried to set it in the 1800s – I tried to type it on a typewriter, I tried a movie,” Doucet said. “But nothing really worked.”
As a child she liked to draw crowds, which suited a new way of working. “I didn’t want to go back to drawing like I used to,” Doucet said, “so I took anatomy books, took a lot of magazines — like old National Geographics — and tried to draw people well, just to try to break the old ways of drawing. .”
Improvising from the bottom of the page and moving up, across five sketchbooks, Doucet created a backdrop of mostly female faces, including her own at age 52. “I’m surrounded by women in my life now, I guess, so it’s my natural environment,” she said.
Against this crowd she unfolds a deceptively simple story: Boy writes letters to girl, who, charmed and intrigued, travels to France, where he has to do military service. The images do not clearly correspond to the story being told, and the reader is advised to read the book as she has drawn it, from bottom to top.
“I wanted to slow down the reader’s experience,” Doucet wrote in an email, “I wanted them to blend in with the crowd.”
The book itself is an unusual object, printed with the outer edges of the pages uncut. “This way you get a sense of the infinite scroll of the book and of course the infinite scroll of memories,” Tracy Hurren, who edited “Time Zone J,” wrote in an email.
“Time Zone J” takes its name from something the Hussar tells Julie: The Earth is divided into 25 time zones, each represented by a letter, with the exception of J. And so “Time Zone J” is an imagined correction, a temporal anomaly where the present-day that Doucet can observe her former self. “The past,” as “Time Zone J” tells us, “it’s like a big, sweet milkshake”: too tempting, too sweet, too easy to consume too quickly. Quietly, subversively, as is her manner, Doucet continues to nail it, refusing sentimentality to give an autopsy of youthful surrender.
“We have something wonderful going on where she revisits a narrative construct she’s created, but she’s doing this as a middle-aged woman, who doesn’t misrepresent herself,” Anne Elizabeth Moore, who wrote a book on Doucet with a non-printable title, said in a telephone interview. “We don’t have many models for female comics artists who do that.”
But even when Doucet tries something new, the comic book world seems to be catching up. In March, she received the Grand Prix at the International Comics Festival of Angoulême, the largest prize in French comics. She dedicated her award to ‘all female authors of the past, present and future’.
She is only the third woman to win in the festival’s 49-year history. “I still can’t believe I won. It’s unbelievable.”
In her fifties, Doucet continues her sober revolution: instead of simply returning to a comic book world she helped shape, she reinvents it simply by doing things the way she wants them to be done.
She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next, she said. “All I know is that I like to work with color.”