A woman, yes, but not necessarily the one we expected. For the first time, the initial vote for the Grand Prix of the Angoulême festival, open to all comic book authors and made public at the beginning of March, had designated a female trio to compete in the second round: Pénélope Bagieu, Catherine Meurisse and Quebecer Julie Doucet. The latter created a surprise by arriving at the top of the votes, rewarded, as is the vocation of the prize, for all of her work and “her imprint in the history of comics”. She is only the 4th woman to win the distinction since 1974 and succeeds the American Chris Ware, crowned last year.
Does the name of Julie Doucet mean anything to you? Nothing suprising. An uncompromising designer, the Canadian has only very rarely had the honors of the press. Trained in graphic arts at the University of Quebec, in Montreal, she discovered comics by meeting designers from punk magazines that were beginning to flourish at the time. Very quickly, she decided to go it alone and created, at the age of 23, her own fanzine, “Dirty Plotte”, “plotte” being the vulgar name for the female sex in Quebec…
In black felt-tip autofiction, with a bold line, a “dirty line” version, she stages herself, in her intimacy, between waxing her legs and menstruating. It’s trashy, violent, raw, very “no future”, but also of a pioneering feminism, at a time when comics were almost exclusively male. A furious poetry too, sometimes.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks revived her in comics
The 14 issues of the magazine, stapled A4 sheets and offered by correspondence, were spotted by a publisher who decided to publish them in album in 1990. The successful American authors of the time – Robert Crumb, Charles Burns or Art Spiegelman — hail his style. In 1991, she received the Harvey Howard prize for “young talent”. In France, the “Association”, then a very young independent publishing house, founded in particular by Lewis Trondheim, spotted it and made it known. Yet it was at this point that Lucie Doucet began to get tired of comics. Environment too masculine, too folded in on itself, she will explain. From 2000, she completely stopped drawing to devote herself to poetic collages, screen printing, wood engraving…
In France, the Quebecer will again be talked about in 2021, with the publication of “Maxiplottes”, a 400-page collection bringing together practically all of her production. Some discover it, others find it. While she had sworn to touch it more, Lucie Doucet has also regained a taste for comics and an album is to be released in Canada. It was after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, in 2015, of which she was a reader, that she wanted to take up the pencils, she recently confided to the magazine Society. The Grand Prix d’Angoulême should probably convince her not to let them go.