Julie Doucet

Julie Doucet (born December 31, 1965) is a Canadian underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Her work is concerned with such topics as "sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues." She used the photocopied zine to record "her day to day life, her dreams, angsts, [and] fantasies." 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. 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.

Post-comics works 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 wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life. That's what's killing me about a lot of those comics guys. Dan Clowes is mostly a writer, a great artist, and has tried different things, But a lot of those guys, their drawing style never changes—the content neither—and it seems it never will. I just don't understand that, how you can spend fifty years of your artist life doing the same thing over and over again. 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.

Return to comics 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."

Awards and honours In 1991, Dirty Plotte was nominated for best new series and Doucet won the Harvey Award for "Best New Talent". In 1999, when The Comics Journal made a list of the top 100 comics of all time, she was on several of the short-lists and Dirty Plotte ranked 96th. In 2000, her book My New York Diary won the Firecracker Award for best graphic novel. Doucet's book 365 Days: A Diary was nominated for best book award at the 2009 Doug Wright Awards. In 2019, Doucet's Dirty Plotte collection was nominated for the SPX Ignatz award for outstanding collection.

In April 2021, she was awarded the Prix Albert-Chartier, during the Festival Québec BD, for her contribution to comics in Quebec.

In March 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême as a lifetime achievement. She is only the third woman to win the award.