This night, the forty ninth version of the Angoulême Worldwide Comedian Artwork Pageant honoured Canadian artist Julie Doucet with its highest award, the Grand Prix. A profession recognition award, Doucet turns into the third girl within the historical past of the competition to obtain the prize – the final being Rumiko Takahashi in 2019.
Doucet received the favour of an citizens of 1,820 comedian guide authors and professionals, beating French cartoonists Catherine Meurisse and Pénélope Bagieu. At a French competition which has beforehand tended to favour their very own creators on the poll, this win comes as an excellent shock.
Writer Drawn & Quarterly delivered her response on receiving the award,
Julie Doucet accepts the @bdangouleme Grand Prix: “Thanks a lot. I’m overwhelmed. It’s arduous to imagine all of it started from nothing, from just a little fanzine within the Nineteen Eighties with a unclean little identify and now I discover myself receiving a very powerful prize within the comics trade.” https://t.co/Ykd3i7pWME
— Drawn & Quarterly (@DandQ) March 16, 2022
In a press launch the Pageant mentioned,
“Within the footsteps of Chris Ware in 2021 and of Emmanuel Guibert the 12 months earlier than that, the Canadian artist Julie Doucet has been awarded the Grand Prix of the forty ninth Angoulême Worldwide Comics Pageant following a vote that concerned 1,820 fellow comedian guide authors.
Twenty-two years have handed since Julie Doucet final produced a comic book strip! Among the artists who voted this 12 months weren’t but born when she printed the final quantity of her Soiled Plotte sequence in 1999. Equally, Calvin and Hobbes creator Invoice Watterson received the Pageant’s Grand Prix in 2014, 19 years after writing his final comedian. This goes to point out that the comics world has reminiscence, and above all, that Julie Doucet’s work – which has vastly influenced comedian artists from the world over – by no means ceases to resume itself!
L’Affiliation’s publication, in 2021, of the profuse anthology Maxiplotte (a part of the Pageant’s Heritage Choice this 12 months) revealed Julie Doucet’s subversive and radical work to those that had not but heard about her.
The Canadian creator was a pioneer of the autobiographical comics style; between 1987 and 1999, she printed fanzines and comics (notably the 12 problems with the legendary Soiled Plotte) to recount her day by day life, in addition to her goals and nightmares. Along with her extraordinary linework, grungy but fantastically elegant in her oh-so private and brashly free fashion, she has produced a radically feminist physique of labor that tackles themes seldom addressed, particularly in such a direct method: the physique, menstruation, sexual fantasies, gender points, and extra.
The Pageant is honoured to welcome such an excellent creator this 12 months. And though she hasn’t printed new work for some time now, hearsay has it she isn’t fairly achieved with the comics realm but!”
Maxiplotte, a whole assortment of Doucet’s Soiled Plotte comics, was launched in France late final 12 months from L’Affiliation and is up for an award on this 12 months’s Heritage Choice (Sélection Patrimoine) on the competition. The English version – titled Soiled Plotte: The Full Julie Doucet – was printed in 2019 by Drawn & Quarterly, unique publishers of the serialised editions of the work.
Subsequent month Doucet returns to comics with Time Zone J, additionally from D&Q, her first new comics work since her prolonged hiatus started within the Nineties.
Doucet had beforehand stopped producing new comics work because of the oppression of working and functioning in a male-dominated house and had moved on to different pursuits. Latest reprintings have introduced her work again into standard consideration and – significantly – of recent readers and potential followers. The award of the Grand Prix is a large endorsement of her prior work and contribution to the sequential artwork kind.
In addition to the deserved recognition, often the Grand Prix winner will obtain a particular exhibition of their work on the following 12 months’s competition. Final 12 months’s winner, Chris Ware, at the moment has an interesting exhibition of his work on show this weekend.
Congratulations to Julie Doucet on this shock and far deserved win!
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