Drawn

For someone who’s given up comics, Montreal artist Julie Doucet’s latest book, 365 Days, a collection of daily illustrated journals originally created in 2002/03 sure seems like comics to me.

It’s a book dense with ink; drawings and meticulously-lettered blocks of text fill its pages to the edges, with no mercy for whitespace. It’s a quality, along with the biographical minutia that populates the book, that make it unlike traditional autobiographical comics. There’s no story here that compels you to turn the page, but I learned quickly that the real joy is in flipping around and reading random pages. Reading the book becomes a lot like randomly discovering an artist’s blog. You read one entry, and then another, until you gradually get a sense of the person’s day-to-day life as well as their creative growth as an artist. It’s at once mundane and fascinating.

Brian Heater’s review is spot-on when he says:

The work’s true success, however, lies in Doucet’s willingness to experiment with the medium, through collage and non-linear storytelling, largely doing away with traditional panels. Whether the product is a result of being strapped for time, or merely her oft-muttered disillusion with the form, the author rarely holds back from experimentation, and the work is richer from it.