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Time Zone J

$29.95

by Julie Doucet

“Time Zone J is a noisy comic, unfurling Doucet’s lifetime memories in an obsessively scrawled jumble: a forest of faces butting up against word balloons, thought bubbles, animals, fabrics, details, graphics, half-empty coffee cups, mosaics of patterns and ephemera, with nary a panel in sight to contain the sequence. Time Zone J does not even have pages, not really – drawn as a continuous spread, each page is connected at its edge to the next as a reminder that no boundaries exist between any sequence in this comic; no moment stands alone, except perhaps the blank verso of each folded, bound sheet, gaps that catch the beholder’s eye like little sighs.” — Helen Chazen, The Comics Journal

Drawn and Quarterly
ISBN: 9781770464988
SKU: 9781770464988 Categories: , Product ID: 90618

Description

A wormhole into a fleeting romance told in a mind-bending first-person chorus

Time Zone J is Julie Doucet’s first inked comic since she famously quit in the nineties after an exhausting career in an industry that, at the time, made little room for women.

The year is 1989 and twenty-three-year-old Doucet is flying to France to meet with a soldier. He’s a man she only knows through their mail correspondence, a common enough reality of the zine era, when comics were mailed from cartoonist to reader and close relationships were formed. Time is not on their side—the soldier is just on furlough for a few days—but the two make the most of their visit and discuss future plans, maybe even Christmas in Doucet’s city, Montreal.

Based on diary entries from the whirlwind romance, the passion and high emotions of youth—before you know the limits of love, before you know the difference between love and lust—seep through the pages. In contrast to the tryst, Doucet draws herself today, at fifty-five.

After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing, creating an alternate universe that foregrounds women. The pages of Time Zone J overflow with images pulled from past and present, faces and people that have inspired Doucet across more than three decades of creative work.

“Elegant, cheeky, wistful, and punk.”―Laura Paul, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“A brave and playful graphic memoir that lands as a full-bore visual assault.”―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Julie Doucet was born near Montreal in 1965 and is best known for her frank, funny, and sometimes shocking comic book series Dirty Plotte, which changed the landscape of alternative cartooning. In the 1990s, Doucet moved between New York, Seattle, Berlin, and Montreal, publishing the graphic novels My New York Diary, Lève Ta Jambe, Mon Poisson Est Mort! (Lift Your Leg, My Fish is Dead!), My Most Secret Desire, and The Madame Paul Affair in this time. In 2000, she quit comics to concentrate on other art forms; from these experiments emerged the collection of engravings and prints Long Time Relationship, and her one-year visual journal, 365 Days. Her post-comics artwork includes silkscreened artist’s books, text-based collages, and animation films.

144 page black and white paperback
(NOTE: each page is folded in half and the book works like a continuous scroll… so… that’s more like 288 pages)
Drawn and Quarterly, 2022

Additional information

Weight 12 oz
Dimensions 8 × 5.5 × 1 in