Happy Women’s History Month! All through March, we’ll be celebrating women who changed free expression in comics. Check back here every weekday for biographical snippets on female creators who have pushed the boundaries of the format and/or seen their work challenged or banned.

Julie Doucet grew up in Montreal, where she attended an all-girls Catholic high school and later obtained a degree in printing arts from Université du Québec à Montréal. In the late 1980s she began working with experimental comics, including her fanzine Dirty Plotte which was originally self-published but was picked up by Drawn & Quarterly in 1991. That series, says D+Q on its Julie Doucet page, “changed the landscape of alternative cartooning, offering a frank, funny, and sometimes shocking melange of dreams, diaries, and stories.”

The 1990s were literally dynamic years for Doucet, as she moved from Montreal to New York to Seattle to Berlin and finally back to Montreal in 1998. Her time in New York, she says drily on her website, “didn’t go too well” and was chronicled in My New York Diary in 1999. During those years Drawn & Quarterly also published two collections of her strips which had originally appeared in alt-weeklies and other periodicals. After returning to her hometown, she ended Dirty Plotte and started a new strip about life in Montreal called The Madame Paul Affair, which was published in collective form in 2000.

After that, Doucet declared that she was done with the comics format–too much work for not enough money, she says–and has since thrown herself into an astounding variety of other artforms including silkscreen printmaking, collage poetry, animation, and papier-mâché sculpture, all tinged with the same wry humor and bustling energy that fans know from her earlier work. She still lives in Montreal, where she now publishes her own work through her press Le Pantalitaire and is deeply involved in the arts community, often exhibiting locally as well as internationally.

–Contributing Editor Maren Williams

