Doucet, Julie in The Books Store

It's 1991 and Julie Doucet abruptly packs her bags and moves to New York City. Trouble follows: a jealous boyfriend, insecurity about her art, worsening epilepsy, and a tendency to self-medicate with booze and drugs. One of D+Q's backlist best-sellers comes back with a new cover design by legendary cartoonist Julie Doucet.

Considered by many to be the most influential female cartoonist ever, Julie Doucet created an iconic body of work in the ten short years she solely devoted herself to her trailblazing comic-book series Dirty Plotte. Her comics are densely inked and detailed with a pulsating neurosis from a decidedly female point of view that set the comic-book world on its head when the series debuted. Doucet returns to comics after a five-year hiatus with a reworked edition of her dream journal My Most Secret Desire, complete with never-before-published material.

My Most Secret Desire is considered to be Doucet ’s most innovative work, exploring the longings, pressures, and exploits of the feminine subconscious. Nightmarish tales of pregnancy, menstruation, sex changes, and boyfriends haunt Doucet’s nocturnal psyche with a feverish and surreal pitch.

Julie Doucet and her boyfriend find a new apartment with cheap rent and a string of nutty neighbors. One ex-con “breaks out” of his apartment by smashing his own window. Another man attempts to kill himself by stuffing his head in a gas oven. But perhaps the oddest person of all is the landlady herself, Madame Paul, who one day mysteriously disappears...

For the past two years, legendary cartoonist Julie Doucet has spent much of her time in her Montreal studio producing a series of bold lino-cut prints and now for the first time ever they are collected in Long Time Relationship, a beautifully-produced book available exclusively in this cloth edition. The book is divided into six chapters, each focusing on a theme; one is a series of eerily compelling portraits based on a dozen family photographs Doucet found discarded in a garbage can in Berlin. In another series, Doucet explores gender issues as no one else can with twenty hilarious, somewhat unflattering portraits of the "modern man". She deftly explores other themes, ranging from fortune cookies to female sexuality (go figure!), and everything is neatly encompassed in this sharply-designed art book. Julie Doucet is internationally renowned for her wry, sexually-charged work, a sort of "female R. Crumb" of comics. She is the author of four books, including the 2000 Firecracker Award-Winner My New York Diary.