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Time Zone J
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.
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.
144 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2022
4 people are currently reading
420 people want to read
About the author
Julie Doucet
62 books182 followersJulie Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary.
Doucet began cartooning in 1987. Her efforts quickly began to attract critical attention, and she won the 1991 Harvey Award for "Best New Talent".
Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York. Although she moved to Seattle the following year, her experiences in New York formed the basis of the critically-acclaimed My New York Diary (1999). She moved from Seattle to Berlin in 1995, before finally returning to Montreal in 1998. Once there, she released the twelfth and final issue of Dirty Plotte before beginning a brief hiatus from comics.
She returned to the field in 2000 with The Madame Paul Affair, a slice-of-life look at contemporary Montreal which was originally serialized in Ici-Montreal, a local alternative weekly. At the same time, she was branching out into more experimental territory, culminating with the 2001 release of Long Time Relationship, a collection of prints and engravings. In 2004, Doucet also published in French an illustrated diary (Journal) chronicling about a year of her life and, in 2006, an autobiography made from a collage of words cut from magazines and newspapers (J comme Je).
In 2007, Doucet published 365 Days, in which she chronicles her life for a year, starting in late 2002.
After a long hiatus, Doucet came back to publication with Time Zone J (2022).
Doucet began cartooning in 1987. Her efforts quickly began to attract critical attention, and she won the 1991 Harvey Award for "Best New Talent".
Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York. Although she moved to Seattle the following year, her experiences in New York formed the basis of the critically-acclaimed My New York Diary (1999). She moved from Seattle to Berlin in 1995, before finally returning to Montreal in 1998. Once there, she released the twelfth and final issue of Dirty Plotte before beginning a brief hiatus from comics.
She returned to the field in 2000 with The Madame Paul Affair, a slice-of-life look at contemporary Montreal which was originally serialized in Ici-Montreal, a local alternative weekly. At the same time, she was branching out into more experimental territory, culminating with the 2001 release of Long Time Relationship, a collection of prints and engravings. In 2004, Doucet also published in French an illustrated diary (Journal) chronicling about a year of her life and, in 2006, an autobiography made from a collage of words cut from magazines and newspapers (J comme Je).
In 2007, Doucet published 365 Days, in which she chronicles her life for a year, starting in late 2002.
After a long hiatus, Doucet came back to publication with Time Zone J (2022).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
September 16, 2022
Julie Doucet's big return to comics... is a bit of a letdown. It's a very experimental comic, not like her more popular works like 'My New York Diary'. Each page is a collage of images, mostly drawings of Doucet's face.
It's kind of a stream-of-consciousness diary. If I'm being honest, I needed to check the write-up to understand what was happening. You do get a sense of the young emotions and passion of the relationship.
"After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing,"
It is wild to think that when Doucet was drawing Dirty Plotte, the industry was mostly men. I mean, it still is, but there's so many graphic novels (and best selling ones at that) penned and drawn by women these days. So much of what Drawn + Quarterly publishes is created by women, and based on the quality of work it's not like they're just being inclusionary.
This is mostly for fans of Doucet. The volume is quite lovely. It has thick double bound pages, I'm not quite sure what it's called but each page is folded in on itself. So it looks likes a 300 page book but is only 150 pages. Doucet hasn't lost her pen skills either. Worth a look. For others, check out her classics instead!
It's kind of a stream-of-consciousness diary. If I'm being honest, I needed to check the write-up to understand what was happening. You do get a sense of the young emotions and passion of the relationship.
"After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing,"
It is wild to think that when Doucet was drawing Dirty Plotte, the industry was mostly men. I mean, it still is, but there's so many graphic novels (and best selling ones at that) penned and drawn by women these days. So much of what Drawn + Quarterly publishes is created by women, and based on the quality of work it's not like they're just being inclusionary.
This is mostly for fans of Doucet. The volume is quite lovely. It has thick double bound pages, I'm not quite sure what it's called but each page is folded in on itself. So it looks likes a 300 page book but is only 150 pages. Doucet hasn't lost her pen skills either. Worth a look. For others, check out her classics instead!
May 24, 2022
A bound mural of words and images unspools via free association doodles of memories and moments, people and places -- a nostalgia wallow really -- from Doucet’s life. It’s like an old-fashioned narrative scroll or moving panorama show, but mostly rando, lacking the purpose, focus, structure, or sheer entertainment value of those works. Admittedly, in the back half a narrative does congeal as Doucet loosely unleashes a tale of stupid love told mostly through endless repetitions of her talking head recounting letters and journals and dreams by way of hard-to-follow word balloons as unstructured and random as everything else in the book.
If this weren’t a library book, I’d be tempted to pull the pages free and wrap them around a couple sticks for the full scrolling effect. That little bit of crafting would probably be more satisfying than actually trying to read this thing.
If this weren’t a library book, I’d be tempted to pull the pages free and wrap them around a couple sticks for the full scrolling effect. That little bit of crafting would probably be more satisfying than actually trying to read this thing.
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April 25, 2022Is there a story? A plot? The author begins the graphic novel by stating that the book was drawn from bottom to top and to read it accordingly, but even so ...
The art is amazing.
The art is amazing.
May 11, 2022
Back to cartooning after shifting her artwork in 2000 to other forms, Time Zone J records a brief but intense she had in 1989 with a soldier she refers to as “the hussar.” Deep into Montréal’s zine scene at the time, a fan struck up a correspondence with her, a sense of comradery was established, and soon an erotic charge animated their relationship, even though phones in 1989 didn’t allow for photo swaps. Two problems face the couple: She’s in Montréal and he’s in France, available for furloughs of only 48 or 72 hours, with little warning of their occurrence.
They meet in person a couple of times, the encounters unnerving but not deal-breaking: The hussar is a depressive who likes to cut himself; whether he would do the same to her against her will feeds her uncertainties.
About the cartoons: The drawings look to have been drawn on a scroll that has been folded into 150 uncut pages. The physical continuity of the work along with the narrative add to the book’s energy, which is already amped by the entangled web of images filling each page. The narrative represent Doucet’s obsessive thoughts, mulled over while drawing random faces and objects on a scroll while day-dreaming about her fling, pieced together from Doucet’s diaries of the time.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
They meet in person a couple of times, the encounters unnerving but not deal-breaking: The hussar is a depressive who likes to cut himself; whether he would do the same to her against her will feeds her uncertainties.
About the cartoons: The drawings look to have been drawn on a scroll that has been folded into 150 uncut pages. The physical continuity of the work along with the narrative add to the book’s energy, which is already amped by the entangled web of images filling each page. The narrative represent Doucet’s obsessive thoughts, mulled over while drawing random faces and objects on a scroll while day-dreaming about her fling, pieced together from Doucet’s diaries of the time.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
March 3, 2023
Remarkable work by a remarkable comics artist: Doucet's comics here have no gutters and one page "bleeds" into the next, the whole length of the book. Also, she designs pages to be read from the bottom, rather than from the top. This demands a reread, with appreciation.
As I was thinking of an analogous storytelling device, I was looking at a mainstream (superhero) comics catalogue featuring a cover artist who had designed five connecting covers - fans are used to this as more than a gimmick, as connective tissue. Doucet takes art sensibility and applies this to her younger self, her journals, letters, and the imagery of those relationships.
Thanks to Fulton Public Library for the loan.
As I was thinking of an analogous storytelling device, I was looking at a mainstream (superhero) comics catalogue featuring a cover artist who had designed five connecting covers - fans are used to this as more than a gimmick, as connective tissue. Doucet takes art sensibility and applies this to her younger self, her journals, letters, and the imagery of those relationships.
Thanks to Fulton Public Library for the loan.
May 28, 2022
so confusing. no idea wats going on. cool style tho
July 7, 2024
I remember when I first saw the book I wanted to buy it for the unique and fun comic style. I don't often read graphic novels. In the beginning it was difficult to understand why certain images were depicted alongside the story in the novel. After reading the summary and author blurb I realized she included people that inspired her during her decades of creative work. If I'm correct this was also her first graphic novel since she stopped creating them in nineties. The artwork could be overwhelming in that regard because of all the unrelated story characters shown. However, I wouldn't mind reading one of her other graphic novels.
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July 16, 2025Me dio muchas ganas de volver a mis cuadernos.
November 2, 2022
Story and structure were confusing and not for me. Artwork is pretty amazing and chaotic. Would potentially consider another work by artist
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August 6, 2023(A version of this review was published, in German, in the Swiss comics journal STRAPAZIN.)
More than twenty years ago, in her mid-30’s and having achieved a great deal of praise, recognition, and awards for her work, Julie Doucet abruptly announced she would no longer be making comics. Her motives came clear only years later; as she told the Montreal Mirror, “I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. … I wished my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.”
Despite her long absence from comics, Doucet was awarded the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême at the beginning of this year. She’s the first Canadian winner, and one of only a handful of female winners, and as if in anticipation of this award Drawn and Quarterly has just published her new … comic?
It’s hard to say exactly what Doucet’s new book TIME ZONE J is. If your definition of “comic” is “a narrative with text and images that uses word balloons,” then TIME ZONE J fits the bill. But the book also seems like something a bit different. With its frankness and mix of fantasy and reality, Doucet’s Dirty Plotte raised the bar for autobiographical comics in the ‘90’s, and TIME ZONE J feels like a challenge to the very medium of comics itself, by a master who’s come back to the form after a long and regenerative vacation.
TIME ZONE J recounts a love affair Doucet had in the late 1980’s, when she was in her mid-20’s. (She and I were born in the same year, so the chronology is easy for me to track.) The ‘80’s were The Age of the ‘Zine, when cartoonists sent Xeroxed work out by mail and often corresponded directly with their readers. (I myself maintained a correspondence with Julie then, and still have her gorgeous collaged letters and postcards to show for it.) Doucet developed a deep and special relationship with one of her readers, a shy soldier in France, and this book tells the story of that brief and intense tryst.
The story itself is not so remarkable—who didn’t experience l‘amour fou in their 20’s?—but the way Doucet tells it is. TIME ZONE J is a leporello, or accordion book: a single continuous strip of paper folded into nearly 150 pages, perhaps reminiscent of a tape—such as the cassette tape on the book’s cover. The ‘80’s were also The Age of the Mixtape, and the book reads as a vibrantly cacophonous visual playlist from Doucet’s memory. She tells the story of her fated affair via a mesmerizing act of automatic drawing, with dense, almost obsessively crowded imagery of people and experiences from her life (or imagination), threaded through with beautiful drawings of animals, especially birds, all accompanying a chorus of 50-something Julies (sometimes a dozen per page) narrating the love affair and her feelings about it … both then and looking back today.
Reading TIME ZONE J is a giddy, emotional, sensuously drunken experience—if one actually “reads” it, since the word balloons on each page often don’t seem to follow any order. (Doucet not-so-helpfully advises, “start from the bottom of the page.”) This art object is the mature work of a (comics) master, one fully deserving of her Angoulême recognition, and whatever you want to call the book it’s a return worth celebrating.
More than twenty years ago, in her mid-30’s and having achieved a great deal of praise, recognition, and awards for her work, Julie Doucet abruptly announced she would no longer be making comics. Her motives came clear only years later; as she told the Montreal Mirror, “I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. … I wished my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.”
Despite her long absence from comics, Doucet was awarded the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême at the beginning of this year. She’s the first Canadian winner, and one of only a handful of female winners, and as if in anticipation of this award Drawn and Quarterly has just published her new … comic?
It’s hard to say exactly what Doucet’s new book TIME ZONE J is. If your definition of “comic” is “a narrative with text and images that uses word balloons,” then TIME ZONE J fits the bill. But the book also seems like something a bit different. With its frankness and mix of fantasy and reality, Doucet’s Dirty Plotte raised the bar for autobiographical comics in the ‘90’s, and TIME ZONE J feels like a challenge to the very medium of comics itself, by a master who’s come back to the form after a long and regenerative vacation.
TIME ZONE J recounts a love affair Doucet had in the late 1980’s, when she was in her mid-20’s. (She and I were born in the same year, so the chronology is easy for me to track.) The ‘80’s were The Age of the ‘Zine, when cartoonists sent Xeroxed work out by mail and often corresponded directly with their readers. (I myself maintained a correspondence with Julie then, and still have her gorgeous collaged letters and postcards to show for it.) Doucet developed a deep and special relationship with one of her readers, a shy soldier in France, and this book tells the story of that brief and intense tryst.
The story itself is not so remarkable—who didn’t experience l‘amour fou in their 20’s?—but the way Doucet tells it is. TIME ZONE J is a leporello, or accordion book: a single continuous strip of paper folded into nearly 150 pages, perhaps reminiscent of a tape—such as the cassette tape on the book’s cover. The ‘80’s were also The Age of the Mixtape, and the book reads as a vibrantly cacophonous visual playlist from Doucet’s memory. She tells the story of her fated affair via a mesmerizing act of automatic drawing, with dense, almost obsessively crowded imagery of people and experiences from her life (or imagination), threaded through with beautiful drawings of animals, especially birds, all accompanying a chorus of 50-something Julies (sometimes a dozen per page) narrating the love affair and her feelings about it … both then and looking back today.
Reading TIME ZONE J is a giddy, emotional, sensuously drunken experience—if one actually “reads” it, since the word balloons on each page often don’t seem to follow any order. (Doucet not-so-helpfully advises, “start from the bottom of the page.”) This art object is the mature work of a (comics) master, one fully deserving of her Angoulême recognition, and whatever you want to call the book it’s a return worth celebrating.
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September 7, 2022I did not read this. It was awful looking inside but I read the first couple pages. Then I read some reviews here on GR and therefore skipped to near the end to read some of the pages about a particular event but even they were not worth my time. The artwork is way too busy and if I’m going to focus on the writing/storytelling, I need something more literate and entertaining and insightful than the notes from someone’s diary or journal.
March 4, 2025
I read My New York Diary during undergrad and enjoyed it. This book has stylistic similarities (experimental, super dense pages) while also being a wholly unique comic reading experience. Its a little challenging, and the narrative is a little thin, but nonetheless enjoyable.
did-not-finish
February 22, 2024DNF @ page 5: not vibing with this style at all 😬
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June 2, 2023more graphic than novel, but i can’t complain - i showed this book off compulsively to whoever i was with because i found it so cool - the uncut pages that allow for a long unbroken illustration are sooooo beautiful. i can’t imagine drawing this. julie doucet is so cool
December 31, 2022
typical doucet
April 15, 2023
it’s a really unique graphic novel!! stream of consciousness but put it into pictures. it’s one huge page folded into a book— one page bleeding into the the next. would love to revisit
June 1, 2023
Raw, engaging. So many drawings of faces close up… the book feels like memory. Like an evolution of comics, and at the same time, very much its own thing.
April 11, 2022
The story isn't the strongest but Doucet's artwork is as exquisitely idiosyncratic as ever, and D&Q's wonderfully offbeat production makes this volume a genuine object, a keeper.
June 22, 2023
What I liked: Amazingly it’s a memoir as if you could be delivered straight into the Doucet’s thoughts and dreams. The art is great of course and it’s an experience like no other.
What I didn’t like: that experience can be extremely frustrating. The bottom to top reading structure (that isn’t followed very closely either) makes reading this a pain and it doesn’t serve the comic in anyway whatsoever. My assumption is drawing it this way allowed Doucet to draw everything stream of consciousness without having to pencil or plan as things, layering as she writes/draws. It comes off more lazy than innovative. Even worse, the book production has major issues. While it’s neat how the bulk of the book is like an accordion, this led to a major oversight in the binding—there’s no margin for the gutter. As a result, almost every page has text that falls so far into the gutter that you would need to tear the pages from the spine to read them at all. A real shame because it’s already difficult to read and this doesn’t help.
It’s a cool art object and I would probably recommend it to a select few friends, but it’s not a great comic.
What I didn’t like: that experience can be extremely frustrating. The bottom to top reading structure (that isn’t followed very closely either) makes reading this a pain and it doesn’t serve the comic in anyway whatsoever. My assumption is drawing it this way allowed Doucet to draw everything stream of consciousness without having to pencil or plan as things, layering as she writes/draws. It comes off more lazy than innovative. Even worse, the book production has major issues. While it’s neat how the bulk of the book is like an accordion, this led to a major oversight in the binding—there’s no margin for the gutter. As a result, almost every page has text that falls so far into the gutter that you would need to tear the pages from the spine to read them at all. A real shame because it’s already difficult to read and this doesn’t help.
It’s a cool art object and I would probably recommend it to a select few friends, but it’s not a great comic.
September 16, 2023
Julie Doucet quite comics in the nineties, in protest against the continued dominance of men in comics. . . which of course removed one very active comics artsist from the scene. .. and now, in her fifties, she returns with work that looks pretty consistent with her work on Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary, a story not unlike others she has written openl;y about, her struggles with relationshsips with men.
So, it's alt comix, experimental storytelling, its very busy crammed black and white, but it's different this time in a couple ways. Now she fills the pages with images of mostly women. There are dreams everywhere; there seems to be near-madness, too, or maybe that's just the effect of multiple fleeting images of memories. And women who influenced her, and whom she was reading, fleeting like the images in The Wizard of Oz Dorothy falling from Kansas to Oz.
The story is not so important as is the way she tells it, a brief slighly crazy relationship she has with a guy she met through online convos about zines, a soldier, and it's only days, not years, so it's fast. And yiou never see imges of the guy, mianly images of the 55-year-old Doucet, as if this is her, thinking back, looking at her detailed journals of the time. It's a frenzied memory dream from 1989, Paris, told from the bottom up, uncut doubled pages that adds to the fast feel, not even time to cut the pages, immediate.
I never fully appreciated Doucet's work when I first read it. It felt part of the alt-comix Crumb crowd, explicit, and wild, too intense, too crammed to reflect, but I liked this quite a bit. I read it the only way one should really read a fever dream, in one sitting, now.
So, it's alt comix, experimental storytelling, its very busy crammed black and white, but it's different this time in a couple ways. Now she fills the pages with images of mostly women. There are dreams everywhere; there seems to be near-madness, too, or maybe that's just the effect of multiple fleeting images of memories. And women who influenced her, and whom she was reading, fleeting like the images in The Wizard of Oz Dorothy falling from Kansas to Oz.
The story is not so important as is the way she tells it, a brief slighly crazy relationship she has with a guy she met through online convos about zines, a soldier, and it's only days, not years, so it's fast. And yiou never see imges of the guy, mianly images of the 55-year-old Doucet, as if this is her, thinking back, looking at her detailed journals of the time. It's a frenzied memory dream from 1989, Paris, told from the bottom up, uncut doubled pages that adds to the fast feel, not even time to cut the pages, immediate.
I never fully appreciated Doucet's work when I first read it. It felt part of the alt-comix Crumb crowd, explicit, and wild, too intense, too crammed to reflect, but I liked this quite a bit. I read it the only way one should really read a fever dream, in one sitting, now.
December 26, 2022
Reading this is like being in a fever dream. The pages - or basically, one long concertina page of drawing - are so crowded with detail and there's an instruction at the start that the pages were drawn bottom up so 'read accordingly'. Sometimes this holds up and sometimes it doesn't, and of you choose the wrong direction thoughts come at you fragmented, the end before the beginning. It's not an easy read, but as it turns out this is eminently suitable for the subject matter, which is rooted in the confusion of navigating a grand passion that's been thrust upon you when you're not even sure you're feeling it, during those teenage years when it's easy to go press the accelerator a bit too hard on how you think adult life should be.
I suspect this will be the subject of much academic study in the graphic novels field. Not sure I loved it but I admire a very different style of storytelling from my own.
I suspect this will be the subject of much academic study in the graphic novels field. Not sure I loved it but I admire a very different style of storytelling from my own.
November 15, 2022
I was a big fan of Dirty Plotte--I still have all my issues--and was thrilled to see a new book by Julie Doucet. This book is definitely in the same vein as her earlier work, but it's a strange little object. I found it to be a surreal exploration of memory through sketches of faces and bodies interspersed with birds and advertisements and random objects, almost a sketch-diary of what the artist was looking at while she was remembering a love affair from long ago. The affair is less romantic than disturbing in its intensity, and I wonder if that's why Doucet couches it in this way, as if she's trying to understand why she made the choices she did as a much younger woman. As a story, I found it somewhat unfulfilling, but as an art object the book is an interesting exploration of the dumb stuff she did in her youth by a mature artist.
September 17, 2023
It'd be hard to overstate what a big deal Doucet was to indie comics readers in the '90s, including me, and it was a bummer (but understandable) that the unrewardingness of the field led her to give it up for a long time. This wild book isn't a return to the kind of things she used to do but it's unmistakably hers and I love it. It's definitely comics, even though it has no familiar layout cues and starts out looking like just an especially good sketchbook until a narrative thread starts emerging from Doucet's many faces that wend their way through the riot of images—she doesn't ever literally depict the story she's telling, only her internal process of reliving it. Great at evoking stormy youth seen through older sadder eyes, while the energy and beauty of all the tangential stuff on every page, and the sharpness of the writing, make it clear that she's as strong as ever.
April 29, 2024
AH yes, to be a messy artist in your youth. I don't have to look back very far to remember it, honestly. Love letters? Maybe we can make this long-distance thing work? Existentialism? ANGST? Check check check CHECK. The format of these pages is wild, like one continuous scroll from left to right. A mixtape. It's a whirlwind mix of dreams and memory, a cascade of portraits and trinkets and visions, and the formatting is unusual but still intuiative or at least not hard to get the gist if you're out of order. I warmed up to it quickly. This is my first time reading the great Julie Doucet and I'm looking forward to The Complete Plotte at some point if I can find it for a good price.
April 30, 2024
I stumbled across this when looking for books to recommend from the library I work at, and wow what a ride. I knew it was a graphic novel memoir but I had no idea that it would be the book it is. I was amazed at the art style and the assembly of the book, which creates a bold, train-of-thought comic. I do like train-of-thought writing and how random and flowing it can be, so I liked the set up of this book. Was I confused a lot of the time? Yes. Did I know everything that was going on? No. Was this bad? Nope! It's a very unique book and depicts a unique life. I think of this more as a piece of personal art and gets my respect.
June 15, 2024
This comics tale is told almost completely in close-up, which is an interesting strategy for a Doucet book that has her usual rambling style that gives dailies about travel, friends, mishaps, and romantic relationships with weirdos. The other conceit of the book is that it's a continuous panel, not just across the left and right sides of the open book but over and around the folio itself... It seems like that could be a cool way to DRAW this story but as a reader I couldn't figure out a way to step back and appreciate that continuity. By the end it felt like I had watched a parade with processional giants pounding past but hadn't taken much away.
October 18, 2024
This one was a bit tough for me. I was drawn in by the inter flap; as a letter writer myself I yearn for a time when this was a means to building connection.
I think the artists style speaks to her personality and thus I feel like I'm in the position of this romantic connection as a reader. Developing a sense of who the person on the other side of the page might be.
This being said I found the actual experience of reading Time Zine J frustrating and underwhelming. There is achèvement in the scope of the illustrations. I wish it was bound differently so I could truly taken them in. A forever fold out is silly but that is my true wish.
I think the artists style speaks to her personality and thus I feel like I'm in the position of this romantic connection as a reader. Developing a sense of who the person on the other side of the page might be.
This being said I found the actual experience of reading Time Zine J frustrating and underwhelming. There is achèvement in the scope of the illustrations. I wish it was bound differently so I could truly taken them in. A forever fold out is silly but that is my true wish.
July 23, 2025
Maniacally, obsessively illustrated in a format sort of designed not to be read (you read each page bottom to top--except when you...don't), this is a diaristic, sketchbook-y comic that is also a loose narrative of Doucet's love affair with an asshole from France in 1989. The art's amazing; I love looking at it. Doucet apparently said she would never draw herself again, then returned to draw this--I guess I'm unclear on why, and why the unconventional format works for the story. The pages are lovely to look at--clean, decisive ink lines--, and I think if i was 13 again i could pore over this for hours, but it seems claustrophobic to me where I am in my life now.
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February 18, 2022So dummy me… I had been looking forward to this, only to discover, when I got access to it today on Edelweiss, that I had my author’s confused!!!
I thought this was by the same author as This Woman’s Work… but that was Julie DelPorte… whereas this is by Julie Doucet.
I am most definitely not the reader for this… so I will say no more about it.
If you were a fan of her work - long long ago - then you might quite enjoy this.
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me acces to an early digital ARC. Sorry I don't feel competent to really write a review about it…
I thought this was by the same author as This Woman’s Work… but that was Julie DelPorte… whereas this is by Julie Doucet.
I am most definitely not the reader for this… so I will say no more about it.
If you were a fan of her work - long long ago - then you might quite enjoy this.
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me acces to an early digital ARC. Sorry I don't feel competent to really write a review about it…
May 17, 2022
Reading this book was a very cool experience! Firstly, the book itself is unique, folded pages with illustrations that go on to the next page and an incredible smell - the best kind of book smell. The drawings made me feel somewhat claustrophobic because they are everywhere, intertwined, competing for attention - they represent the messiness of being that age so well and they force you to be in that moment, to witness the story. It really feels as if Doucet uploaded the memories from her head to the pages.
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