Conversation with Julie Doucet
Grand Prix at Angoulême International Comics Festival

The singular and subversive Quebec artist Julie Doucet, winner of the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2022, is stopping by the Canadian Cultural Centre for a unique encounter. Feminist figurehead of alternative comics, she will be presenting her new book Suicide total, published in January by L’Association, and talking about her artistic creations such as collage, woodcutting and silkscreening.

Julie Doucet had promised to stop writing comics and autobiography. Now she’s back on her word with Suicide total, a fabulous immersive fresco drawn in one piece that carries us away like a river going back in time.

We are in 1989, Julie is 23 years old, she produces fanzines that she distributes in bookshops or by mail order. She then begins an intense epistolary relationship with one of her readers, a Frenchman. The two young people write hundreds of letters to each other and become enthusiastic about each other, until a trip to Europe gives them the opportunity to meet in the flesh…

By the time she won the Grand Prix, Julie Doucet had stopped writting comics for some twenty years. And yet, she has continued to have a considerable influence on a generation of creators. She is now a myth.

Julie Doucet, born in 1965 in Montreal, is one of the most important comic book authors of the end of the last century. While studying at the University of Quebec in Montreal, she discovered comics and began publishing a photocopied fanzine: “Dirty Plotte”, in which she documented her daily life, dreams and anxieties in French and English. The title was picked up in 1991 by the Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly, which published them. After living in New York, Seattle and Berlin, Julie Doucet returned to Montreal where she lives and works, now operating in a field closer to the graphic arts (collage, poetry, photo novels).

This meeting will be moderated by Julien Misserey, curator of the exhibition Julie Doucet, toujours de grande classe and member of the artistic direction team of the FIBD in Angoulême.

It will be followed by a signing session.

Book sales will be provided by the Librairie du Québec à Paris.

In collaboration with L’Association.