Time Zone J

A wormhole into a fleeting romance told in a mind-bending first-person chorus

Time Zone J is Julie Doucet’s first inked comic since she famously quit in the nineties after an exhausting career in an industry that, at the time, made little room for women.

The year is 1989 and twenty-three-year-old Doucet is flying to France to meet with a soldier. He’s a man she only knows through their mail correspondence, a common enough reality of the zine era, when comics were mailed from cartoonist to reader and close relationships were formed. Time is not on their side—the soldier is just on furlough for a few days—but the two make the most of their visit and discuss future plans, maybe even Christmas in Doucet’s city, Montreal.

Based on diary entries from the whirlwind romance, the passion and high emotions of youth—before you know the limits of love, before you know the difference between love and lust—seep through the pages. In contrast to the tryst, Doucet draws herself today, at fifty-five.

After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing, creating an alternate universe that foregrounds women. The pages of Time Zone J overflow with images pulled from past and present, faces and people that have inspired Doucet across more than three decades of creative work.

$29.95

In stock

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NPR Books We Love 2022

Globe and Mail Top 5 Graphic Novels of 2022

"Julie Doucet is back!"—NPR Books We Love 2022

"A trippy, semi-tragic comic that tells the story of an amour fou she shared with a troubled Parisian man in the late ’80s. Its full-bleed pages are packed with black-pen renderings of her current middle-aged self, random advertisements, observations, and doodles. Câlice, it’s good to have her back."—Madeline Coleman, Vulture

"In her first work of graphic memoir in almost two decades, Doucet looks back to the late 1980s, when she began her legendary Dirty Plotte comics, to revisit the story of a long-distance tryst. Doucet recreates the affair’s intensity through furious feats of drawing, each page crammed full of allusive imagery."—Globe and Mail Top 5 Graphic Novels of 2022

“With dense compositions rendered in thick black ink (Doucet still draws as she did in the ’90s, as if she’s trying to blast through your skull and stamp her emblem on your brain), this is a book that won’t be ignored or denied.”—Etelka Lehoczky, New York Times

“’The past,’ as Time Zone J tells us, ‘it’s like a big sugary milkshake’: too tempting, too sweet, too easy to consume too quickly. Quietly, subversively, as is her way, Doucet proceeds to spike it, refusing sentimentality in order to provide an autopsy of youthful abandon.”—Yevgeniya Traps, New York Times

"Elegant, cheeky, wistful, and punk."—Laura Paul, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"[Time Zone J] makes for an especially rewarding experience if you embrace the spontaneity of her work, which is driven by the mercurial sensations of memory."—Oliver Sava, The AV Club

"A triumph of nostalgia and memory. [Time Zone J] is the ideal follow-up to a long hiatus: a new work that builds on her past, while simultaneously elevating her entire (already very impressive) oeuvre."—Megan Kirby, The Chicago Reader

"Immersive... You sense that mild disorientation — the good kind, the kind that gets you seeing and thinking in fresh ways — is part of Doucet’s point."—Ian McGillis, The Montreal Gazette

“A brave and playful graphic memoir that lands as a full-bore visual assault.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Doucet has retained her deft ability to create visually stunning narratives that draw on the past, while maintaining a sense of immediacy and candor."—Herizons

ISBN : 9781770464988

Binding : Paperback

Pages : 144

Trim Size : 5.3 x 8.2

Color : Black-and-white illustrations throughout