Julie Doucet

Julie Doucet studied at Cégep du Vieux Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal. The recorded working language is French and English. Works named in the authority record are Dirty Plotte. Distinctions recorded are Harvey Awards, Harvey Award for Best New Talent, Canadian Comic Book Hall of Fame and Grand prix de la ville d'Angoulême.

• Born — 31 December 1965 • Birthplace — Montreal, Quebec, Canada • Cartoonist — true • Artist — true • Notable Works — Dirty Plotte My New York Diary • Awards — Harvey Award for "Best New Talent" (1991) Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême (2022) • Nonus — true

Doucet was born in Montreal, Quebec. She was educated at an all-girls Catholic school, studied fine arts at Cégep du Vieux Montréal (a junior college), then attended Université du Québec à Montréal. Her university degree was in printing arts. She began cartooning in 1987. She was published in small-press comics and self-published her own comic called Dirty Plotte. She used the photocopied zine to record "her day to day life, her dreams, angsts, [and] fantasies."

After Doucet's sixth issue of Dirty Plotte, she was noticed by fellow cartoonist/editor Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Kominsky-Crumb was influential in the underground feminist comics scene, participated in early issues of the underground anthology Wimmen's Comix, and at that point was the editor of the anthology comic series Weirdo (started by her husband, Robert Crumb). Kominsky-Crumb asked to publish Doucet's story "E: Ni Manique," retitled "Heavy Flow," in the fall 1989 issue of Weirdo. Kominsky-Crumb then introduced Doucet to Wimmin's Comix, and Doucet published three comic stories in the 15th issue in 1989: "You know, I'm a very shy girl", "Tampax Again", " and "The First Time I Shaved my Legs...," It was at this point that Doucet began to attract critical attention. Doucet began being published by Drawn & Quarterly in January 1991 in a regular-sized comic series also named Dirty Plotte. Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York City. Although she moved to Seattle the following year, her experiences in New York formed the basis of the critically acclaimed My New York Diary (many stories of which were taken from Dirty Plotte). She moved from Seattle to Berlin in 1995, before finally returning to Montreal in 1998. While in Berlin, she had a book named Ciboire de criss published by L'Association in Paris, her first book in French. Once back in Montreal, she released the twelfth and final issue of Dirty Plotte before beginning a brief hiatus from comics. She returned to the field in 2000 with The Madame Paul Affair, a slice-of-life look at contemporary Montreal which was originally serialized in Ici-Montreal, a local alternative weekly. At the same time, she was branching out into more experimental territory, culminating with the 2001 release of Long Time Relationship, a collection of prints and engravings. In 2004, Doucet also published in French an illustrated diary (Journal) chronicling a year of her life and, in 2006, an autobiography made from a collage of words cut from magazines and newspapers (J comme Je). In spring of 2006 she had her first solo print show, named en souvenir du Melek, at the galerie B-312 in Montreal. In December 2007, Drawn and Quarterly published 365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet, in which she chronicled her life for a year, starting in late 2002.

Doucet remained prominent in the Montreal arts community, but in an interview in the June 22, 2006, edition of the Montreal Mirror, she declared that she had retired from long-form comics. She also said "...it's quite a lot of work, and not that much money. I went to a newspaper to propose a comic strip because I only had to draw a small page and it would be out the next week. For once it was regular pay and good money." I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end. I never made enough money from comics to be able to take a break and do something else. Now I just can't stand comics. She had a book of poetry published by L'Oie de Cravan in 2006, À l’école de l’amour. Her post-comics artwork consists of linocuts, collage, and papier-mâché sculptures. In 2007, Doucet designed the cover for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

In April 2022, Doucet returned to making comics with Time Zone J, published by Drawn and Quarterly. As she said about making the new comic: "I tried to tell it in cutout words, I tried to set 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 typing machine, I tried to make a movie.... But nothing really worked." Time Zone J is notable for its unusual format, which is designed to be read from the bottom of each page to the top.

Doucet's name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic."