Time Zone J is featured in the New York Times!

Goodness gracious: Julie Doucet has a new graphic novel out! This is staggering news. Renowned since the ’90s for the brutally frank, aggressively complex “Dirty Plotte” as well as numerous other books, Doucet quit drawing more than 20 years ago. This long quiet period has, naturally, accorded her a staggering level of prestige in the comics world. Just last month she became the third woman ever awarded the Grand Prix lifetime achievement award at the distinguished Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Not surprisingly, her new work, TIME ZONE J (Drawn & Quarterly, 144 pp., $29.95), is about memory — specifically, a particular cluster of memories from back when she was still making comics. She digs up and spreads out her recollections of a love affair she embarked on in 1989, when she was first drawing “Dirty Plotte.” She spreads them out quite literally, in fact: She fills up every page completely, drawing across page boundaries and even smudging onto the book’s uncut edges, as if she’s working on a single long scroll. That’s one of many ways “Time Zone J” establishes its space on the pavement. 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.

Read the rest of the article here!