Abstract

An enormously influential presence in the alternative comics scene of the 1980s and 1990s, feminist artist Julie Doucet is known for a rough style and taboo-breaking approach to mostly autobiographical subject matter that unsettle and disrupt misogynistic visual transitions associated with the representation of women in comics. After famously retiring from what she called the “boys’ club” of comics in the late 1990s, Doucet returned to graphic memoir in 2022 with Time Zone J, an in every way highly unusual book that is conceived according to a logic that is fundamentally unrooted from existing modes of creating and understanding comics.

In this talk, I argue that Time Zone J is a watershed work that forces us to reassess our understanding not only of the formal poetics and reading practices of the comics medium itself, but also the established conventions of how to represent time, space, and memory in graphic memoir—as well as in lifewriting more generally.