Julie Doucet: How A Zine Author Went Canonical
Los Angeles Review of Books | Aubrey Gabel | July 23, 2022
Los Angeles Review of Books publishes an essay on Julie Doucet
PICTURE THIS: a 50-foot woman attacks New York City, but this time, rather than a revenge-seeking trophy wife, the monster is a menstruating Gen Xer, half-Hulk half-Amazonian, transformed due to a dearth of tampons. In an iconic, full-page panel, this she-beast spews her blood all over the city and crushes grown men in her bare hands as B2 helicopters flee her path. A literal Crimson Wave fills the streets in later frames until finally the monster punches through a roof, retrieves some Tampax, and returns to normal, safely in the hands of the police. This is the imaginative universe of the comics artist Julie Doucet: a quirky, grotesque send-up of the toils of female embodiment that finishes in an outright homage to the Tampon, that now-dated symbol of Western women’s liberation.
Doucet has won the grand prize at the 2022 Angoulême Festival, but she was not the most obvious choice given her origins in the North American zine scene of the late ’90s. Born in the suburbs of Montreal in 1965, Doucet attended an all-Catholic girls’ school before going on to study at a junior college and then a university in Montreal. After her early comics circulated in university newspapers, she was picked up by Factsheet Five, a who’s who of North American zine art, which began regularly running her comic strip Dirty Plotte (literally “dirty cunt,” referring to both the person and the genitalia) in 1988. She was all over the zine scene of the time, even breaking into French mags like ‘Zine zine and S21'Art?. But it was her Factsheet strips that caught the attention of Chris Oliveros, who had dreams of building the now-seminal Canadian comics press Drawn & Quarterly. Dirty Plotte, alongside reprints and new material in My New York Diary (2000) became the centerpiece of Drawn & Quarterly’s nascent catalog, bringing in future visionaries like the Sacramento teen Adrian Tomine.
The young Doucet produced her early comics at a feverish pace, drawing 15 issues in 18 months. Far from being sloppy or intentionally unfinished, her drawings are often overburdened with extraneous detail. The googly-eyed, bobble-head weirdos of My New York Diary are drawn like ghastly, midcentury Mickey cartoons who are (literally) on crack, surrounded by the detritus of artistic life: pens, paper, beer bottles, cats, and trash. While My New York Diary blankly recounts juvenile experiments in drugs (like the now-bygone whippets, or nitrous oxide inhalation), it also tracks experiences of the young artist-transplant. Doucet’s rise in the comics scene parallels her growing feminist consciousness, as Doucet painstakingly tracks all the emotional labor she performs for her male friends and partners.
Young Doucet is known for her outlandishly offensive drawn scenarios that provocatively confuse the consumption of food and bodies — whether it be masturbating with a cookie, feeding a tampon to a penis, romancing a beer bottle, or eating a male appendage on buns. She was also a pioneer of the solicited dick pic. Coming of age during the heyday of the adult alternative comics scene in 1960s and ’70s France and the US, Doucet grappled with the masculine universe of French zines like F’murr and comics magazines like L’Écho des savanes (The Echo of the Savannah); the latter infamously asked readers to submit polaroids of their girlfriends doing a striptease. Her response was twofold: not just to request her own penis shots (and preferred usernames), but to render stripping as a revolting experiment. In one instance, a masculine woman donning a full suit gradually disrobes to her skivvies only to cut off, one by one, each of her breasts and eventually take a knife to her entrails (spilled for the consumption of a nearby cat and dog). Another now-infamous strip shows a sex worker taking a john home, stripping out of her costume to reveal a man, who in turn unzips to reveal a wolf, and then a snake, who finally performs fellatio on the john.
Doucet was also not averse to the cheap joke. She wrote a series of homoerotic, slash-adjacent panels, in which Kirk and Spock “possess” various planets by urinating on them, sometimes to comedic effect. (Urinating is difficult in a zero-gravity atmosphere.) If Doucet revels in anthropomorphizing, gender-bending feminist satire, she also narrates the most banal of the banal, like a bad, absentee landlord by the name of Madame Paul (in her The Madame Paul Affair [2000]), or a couple bickering to get ready to go (although they are anthropomorphic cats). If she shied away from the deep investigation of relationship drama that interested her peers — as in Alison Bechdel’s long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For — she nevertheless represented substance and domestic abuse and embraced the body in an utterly millennial manner. Doucet is far from the consciousness-raising Instagram posts of late, like Lena Dunham’s detailed accounts of living with endometriosis, which tend to focus on educating a broader public. Doucet does, however, stage aggressively personal bodily experiences, like losing one’s virginity, miscarriages, mastectomies, childbirth, or profoundly unsexy sex.
Click here for the rest of the essay!
Doucet has won the grand prize at the 2022 Angoulême Festival, but she was not the most obvious choice given her origins in the North American zine scene of the late ’90s. Born in the suburbs of Montreal in 1965, Doucet attended an all-Catholic girls’ school before going on to study at a junior college and then a university in Montreal. After her early comics circulated in university newspapers, she was picked up by Factsheet Five, a who’s who of North American zine art, which began regularly running her comic strip Dirty Plotte (literally “dirty cunt,” referring to both the person and the genitalia) in 1988. She was all over the zine scene of the time, even breaking into French mags like ‘Zine zine and S21'Art?. But it was her Factsheet strips that caught the attention of Chris Oliveros, who had dreams of building the now-seminal Canadian comics press Drawn & Quarterly. Dirty Plotte, alongside reprints and new material in My New York Diary (2000) became the centerpiece of Drawn & Quarterly’s nascent catalog, bringing in future visionaries like the Sacramento teen Adrian Tomine.
The young Doucet produced her early comics at a feverish pace, drawing 15 issues in 18 months. Far from being sloppy or intentionally unfinished, her drawings are often overburdened with extraneous detail. The googly-eyed, bobble-head weirdos of My New York Diary are drawn like ghastly, midcentury Mickey cartoons who are (literally) on crack, surrounded by the detritus of artistic life: pens, paper, beer bottles, cats, and trash. While My New York Diary blankly recounts juvenile experiments in drugs (like the now-bygone whippets, or nitrous oxide inhalation), it also tracks experiences of the young artist-transplant. Doucet’s rise in the comics scene parallels her growing feminist consciousness, as Doucet painstakingly tracks all the emotional labor she performs for her male friends and partners.
Young Doucet is known for her outlandishly offensive drawn scenarios that provocatively confuse the consumption of food and bodies — whether it be masturbating with a cookie, feeding a tampon to a penis, romancing a beer bottle, or eating a male appendage on buns. She was also a pioneer of the solicited dick pic. Coming of age during the heyday of the adult alternative comics scene in 1960s and ’70s France and the US, Doucet grappled with the masculine universe of French zines like F’murr and comics magazines like L’Écho des savanes (The Echo of the Savannah); the latter infamously asked readers to submit polaroids of their girlfriends doing a striptease. Her response was twofold: not just to request her own penis shots (and preferred usernames), but to render stripping as a revolting experiment. In one instance, a masculine woman donning a full suit gradually disrobes to her skivvies only to cut off, one by one, each of her breasts and eventually take a knife to her entrails (spilled for the consumption of a nearby cat and dog). Another now-infamous strip shows a sex worker taking a john home, stripping out of her costume to reveal a man, who in turn unzips to reveal a wolf, and then a snake, who finally performs fellatio on the john.
Doucet was also not averse to the cheap joke. She wrote a series of homoerotic, slash-adjacent panels, in which Kirk and Spock “possess” various planets by urinating on them, sometimes to comedic effect. (Urinating is difficult in a zero-gravity atmosphere.) If Doucet revels in anthropomorphizing, gender-bending feminist satire, she also narrates the most banal of the banal, like a bad, absentee landlord by the name of Madame Paul (in her The Madame Paul Affair [2000]), or a couple bickering to get ready to go (although they are anthropomorphic cats). If she shied away from the deep investigation of relationship drama that interested her peers — as in Alison Bechdel’s long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For — she nevertheless represented substance and domestic abuse and embraced the body in an utterly millennial manner. Doucet is far from the consciousness-raising Instagram posts of late, like Lena Dunham’s detailed accounts of living with endometriosis, which tend to focus on educating a broader public. Doucet does, however, stage aggressively personal bodily experiences, like losing one’s virginity, miscarriages, mastectomies, childbirth, or profoundly unsexy sex.
Click here for the rest of the essay!