The cult cult of Dirty Plotte received, Wednesday, March 16, the prestigious grand prize of the Angoulême festival, twenty-three years after the publication of his last album. A consecration to which the Quebec press is delighted.
“Cartoon artist Julie Doucet has just written a page of history”, rejoiced The Journal of Montreal, Wednesday, March 16, as soon as the name of the winner of the grand prize of the 49e Angoulême festival, one of the most prestigious international awards for BD.
“After the French Florence Cestac, in 2000, and the Japanese Rumiko Takahashi, in 2019”, Julie Doucet has become “the third woman, and the first Quebecer, to win the grand prize”, point out right away The duty, before recalling the controversy that erupted in 2016 following the 100% male selection presented that year by the festival.
“For the first time in the history of the festival, three women competed for the honor, namely Catherine Meurisse, Pénélope Bagieu and Julie Doucet”, developed The Press. This other Montreal daily is no less enthusiastic than its colleagues about this consecration:
Julie Doucet now sits in the pantheon of comics with big names like Franquin, Tardi, Enki Bilal, Régis Loisel or Art Spiegelman, to name a few.
It was in 1990 that Julie Doucet, then a student at the Beaux-Arts de Montréal, embarked on self-taught comics, launching a fanzine called Dirty Plotte – a publication with a deliberately vulgar title (which she translates as “disgusting vagina” or “dirty slit”), “where she recounted in French and English her daily life, her anxieties, her dreams”.
Last album in 1999
Totally artisanal (the author, now 56, photocopied, stapled and distributed the pages of her fanzine herself), Dirty Plotte was quick to be noticed in the middle of the BD alternative. “From this project were born other albums with no more proper names (including Criss ciborium [un juron québécois])”, s’amuse The Press.
Having become a major figure in the ninth art, Julie Doucet nevertheless decided to stop everything after about ten years, “disgusted by the ambient machismo”, reports The duty. Exploring other arts, such as engraving, she hasn’t released an album since 1999.
A return to the sources to be expected?
In France, an anthology published in November at L’Association had already revived readers’ interest in his work, which remained cult for insiders.
“Will this award convince her to return to her first love?” asks himself The Press. A new book is in any case planned, in English, from the specialized publisher Drawn & Quarterly, for the month of April (no date has yet been announced for a French edition). The author presents it as “A revisit of comics. There are no squares, however; it is a large continuous fresco which extends over 130 pages. But it’s narrative, it’s autobiographical. And there are bubbles!”
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