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.

Julie Doucet's profile page

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, 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.

With dense compositions rendered in thick black ink (Doucet still draws as she did in the ’90s, as if she’s trying to blast through your skull and stamp her emblem on your brain), this is a book that won’t be ignored or denied.

Etelka Lehoczky, New York Times

[Time Zone J] makes for an especially rewarding experience if you embrace the spontaneity of her work, which is driven by the mercurial sensations of memory.

Oliver Sava, The AV Club

A trippy, semi-tragic comic that tells the story of an amour fou she shared with a troubled Parisian man in the late ’80s. Its full-bleed pages are packed with black-pen renderings of her current middle-aged self, random advertisements, observations, and doodles. Câlice, it’s good to have her back.

Madeline Coleman, Vulture

Elegant, cheeky, wistful, and punk.

Laura Paul, The Los Angeles Review of Books

’The past,’ as Time Zone J tells us, ‘it’s like a big sugary milkshake’: too tempting, too sweet, too easy to consume too quickly. Quietly, subversively, as is her way, Doucet proceeds to spike it, refusing sentimentality in order to provide an autopsy of youthful abandon.

Yevgeniya Traps, New York Times