Dirty Plotte

The subject matter of Dirty Plotte is Doucet's own life, but the emphasis is on the parts most autobiography quietly edits out. Menstruation is everywhere — not as a symbol, just as a monthly event that stains and inconveniences and occasionally goes spectacularly, comically wrong. She draws herself bleeding, cleaning up, running out of supplies, improvising. The body in these comics is not a well-behaved vessel for a personality; it leaks, aches, wants things, and embarrasses its owner.

Alongside the daily material runs a strong vein of the fantastical. Doucet drew her dreams, and the dream strips are some of the most startling pages in the run — she cuts off her own limbs, changes sex, grows extra body parts, murders and is murdered, all rendered with the same matter-of-fact density as a scene of doing the dishes. The violence is cheerful and surreal rather than dark, closer to the logic of a nightmare recounted over coffee than to horror. It gives the collection a texture where the ordinary and the impossible sit flush against each other.

Autobiographical comics existed before Dirty Plotte — the underground had made a whole mode out of the cartoonist's own life. What Doucet added was a female first person that declined every softening move available to it. She did not make herself sympathetic, did not stage her experiences as lessons, did not tidy the mess into a narrative arc. The strips are episodic and unresolved, closer to a diary than a memoir, and that refusal of shape is itself the argument.

The frankness about the body is the part most often cited, and rightly, but it works because of the drawing rather than in spite of it. The dense, cluttered panels give even the most explicit material a kind of domestic ordinariness; a page about blood looks like a page about a messy apartment, because to Doucet it is one. The register never tips into shock for its own sake. It is too busy being specific.

Step back from the specific pages and Dirty Plotte reads as one of the works that changed what the comics form was understood to be capable of. The medium had spent decades proving it could do adventure, satire, and the male underground confessional. Doucet's contribution was to show that it could hold the female interior — the body, the dream, the unglamorous daily self — without translating any of it into the shapes those other modes preferred. She widened the range of what a comic could be about, and just as importantly, who it could be by.

Part of that widening is technical. The zine aesthetic she carried into print — the handmade density, the refusal of clean composition — helped legitimize a whole way of making comics that did not look like professional cartooning and did not want to. The page could be crowded, nervous, personal. It could feel like an object someone made in an apartment, because it was, and that texture turned out to be a resource rather than a limitation.

The whole of Dirty Plotte now fits in one hardback, a long way from the stapled folds that went out through the mail from a Montréal apartment. Reading it in a single block, the surprise is how little of it needs the archaeology — the blood, the dreams, the wandering days still land with the immediacy of something made yesterday, because Doucet never dressed them up in the fashions of their moment. The work aged well precisely because it refused to flatter itself in the first place.