Julie Doucet
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Julie Doucet (born December 31, 1965 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a Canadian underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary.
She began cartooning in 1987. Her efforts quickly began to attract critical attention, and she won the 1991 Harvey Award for "Best New Talent".
Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York. Although she moved to Seattle the following year, her experiences in New York formed the basis of the critically-acclaimed My New York Diary. She moved from Seattle to Berlin in 1995, before finally returning to Montreal in 1998. Once there, 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 about 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 December 2007, Drawn & Quarterly will publish 365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet, in which she chronicles her life for a year, starting in late 2002.
She remains a fixture 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: "...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."
[edit] Bibliography
- Dirty Plotte # 1 (January 1991)
- Dirty Plotte # 2 (March 1991)
- Dirty Plotte # 3 (July 1991)
- Dirty Plotte # 4 (October 1991)
- Dirty Plotte # 5 (May 1992)
- Dirty Plotte # 6 (January 1993)
- Dirty Plotte # 7 (September 1993)
- Dirty Plotte # 8 (February 1994)
- Dirty Plotte # 9 (April 1995)
- Dirty Plotte # 10 (December 1996)
- Dirty Plotte # 11 (September 1997)
- Dirty Plotte # 12 (August 1998)
- My New York Diary (May 1999)
- My Most Secret Desire (1995)
- Lift Your Leg, My Fish is Dead! (1993)
- The Madame Paul Affair (2000)
- Long Time Relationship (2001)
- Journal (2004)
- J comme Je (2006)
- Elle Humour (2006)
- 365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet (2007)
[edit] Quotes
"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."
"...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 50 years of your artist life doing the same thing over and over again."
Reference: "A Good Life: The Julie Doucet Interview" by Dan Nadel, published in The Drama, issue No 7 (2006).
