Julie Doucet, a “feminist to the core” and underground Angoulême Grand Prix

by time news

Three authors made up the trio of finalists for the Angoulême Grand Prix, a first since the International Comics Festival changed its designation system in 2017 – a year earlier, a lively controversy had highlighted the under-representation of women in the ninth art.

Organized with an electorate made up exclusively of professionals (draughtsmen, screenwriters, colorists, etc.), the ballot finally raised Julie Doucet to the list of winners of the event, Wednesday March 16, on the occasion of the opening evening of its 49e editing. The Canadian was ahead of the French Pénélope Bagieu and Catherine Meurisse. She is the third woman to become the winner of the Grand Prix, after the Frenchwoman Florence Cestac, in 2000, and the Japanese Rumiko Takahashi, in 2019. In 1982, Claire Bretécher (1940-2020) had obtained a Grand Prix called the “tenth anniversary », on the sidelines of the traditional Grand Prix (awarded to Paul Gillon, 1926-2011).

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Follower of a “dirty” line, the Quebecer transgresses all the themes of North American puritanism by using a desperate and uninhibited humor

Aged 56, Julie Doucet is a singular figure in the ninth art, an author who, although she has never campaigned for any feminist association, claims to “feminist through and through”, as she says to World, during an email exchange. Developed in a fanzine bearing the name of Dirty Plotte – “disgusting vagina” or “dirty slit”, according to the translation that she proposes herself –, her remarks with a strong autobiographical dimension intertwine dreams and fantasies, fears and frustrations, raw stories and anecdotes from everyday life.

“Maxiplotte” (2021), by Julie Doucet.

It’s about drugs, sex, menstruation, self-mutilation, depression, masturbation, drinking, failed suicide, breast cancer… Follower of a “dirty” line, the Quebecer transgresses all the themes of North American puritanism by using a desperate and uninhibited humor, which made her a leader in underground comics.

Abandonment of comics

A medium from which she herself distanced herself at the end of the 1990s, tired of spawning in a largely male environment, as she explains in the last pages of Maxiplotte (L’Association, 2021), which brings together on 400 pages almost all of his comic book production (1990-1998): “I was tired of being surrounded by just men. It was something I was very comfortable with, at first (…). With men, I thought we had more tastes and more interests in common, but in the end no… Not at all. (…) In comics, men are… nerds ! Pretty obsessive people, who tend not to be interested in much else than comics. »

Julie Doucet says to herself today ” blown “ to see that three women were in the running for the Angoulême Grand Prix. ” What is happening ? I just hope it represents a lasting trend, not a jolt, or a small episode,” she supports, re-explaining the reasons for her abandonment of comics: “It’s hard for me to put it into words because, of course, I have lots of good (male) friends in the business… But it was the absence of women at the time that wore me down . In the long run. »

“Maxiplotte” (2021), by Julie Doucet.

The Canadian had then pursued her artistic career on various fronts, such as engraving, micro-publishing, the photo-novel or poetry, before returning for the first time to drawing through a Journal, in which she told herself at the rate of one drawing a day for a year. The second time was after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, in 2015.

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In Angoulême, Julie Doucet should not fail to mention, during her stay in France, her new book project, Time Zone J, “a revisit to the comic strip, although it does not look like a conventional comic strip”, she comments.

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