Another comic has her lying in bed and realizing she needs to change her tampon. One famous story has her growing to Godzilla size when her period hits, literally flooding the streets with her menstrual blood. Where she decidedly separates from this pack, however, is through her focus on specific female concerns, especially menstruation. Many of these comics owe a good deal to the work of ’60s underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb and S. In issue three, she takes a hatchet to a naked man, cuts his body with a razor blade, cuts off his penis, and then uses the bloody stump to write “fin” on the wall. Another has a stalker murdering a child and then letting his dog devour the body (“dog is truly man’s best friend”). One very early comic shows her performing a strip tease that ends with her ripping off her breasts and slicing up her midsection, as her dog and cat leap hungrily toward her entrails. Other strips push boundaries even farther. After a few examples of everyday usage, Doucet glares at us with a sultry look, drooling lips, and a razor blade necklace, saying, “You know, plotte is a very dirty word. The title, she explains on the very first page of the very first issue, is a Quebecois slur for vagina (or a woman with loose morals). Right from the get go Doucet made it clear she was taking no prisoners and offering no apologies. ![]() The initial attention she received with those early comics (as well as some appearances in notable anthologies like Weirdo) led to her getting picked up by Drawn and Quarterly, the first regular artist in their soon-to-be impressive stable (up till then they had been solely devoted to publishing a quarterly anthology). Now, all 12 issues of that seminal series have been collected in the rather massive The Complete Dirty Plotte, an impressive two-volume slipcase that also includes stories done for anthologies, essays, interviews, and other esoterica.ĭoucet got her start in the heady “alternative” world of zines and mini-comics, where people, in the pre-Internet days, would photocopy or publish their musings in art in a small pamphlet or magazine and send it to folks through the mail. ![]() Reading her comics, you could be excused for wishing you had an ounce of her fearlessness, at least when it came to putting ink on paper. In her groundbreaking 1990s series, Dirty Plotte, Doucet delineated an aesthetic that was brazen, clever, funny, and broke taboos like they were cheap ceramic plates. It’s unusual for anyone to wish they could be as cool as a cartoonist, but Julie Doucet is the rare exception to that rule.
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