Julie Doucet, who started publishing in the late 1980s, is a cartoonist and artist best known for her semi-auto biographical works, as depicted in her Dirty Plotte series as well as My New York Diary. Coming into her own in the late 1990s, when she first started self-publishing her comics, Gabrielle Bell rose to prominence with her 2009 book of short story comics, Cecil and Jordan in New York, as well as her diary comics, which have been recurrently collected in full-length books. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and world view, the essays in this book investigate these artis ... More

Julie Doucet, who started publishing in the late 1980s, is a cartoonist and artist best known for her semi-auto biographical works, as depicted in her Dirty Plotte series as well as My New York Diary. Coming into her own in the late 1990s, when she first started self-publishing her comics, Gabrielle Bell rose to prominence with her 2009 book of short story comics, Cecil and Jordan in New York, as well as her diary comics, which have been recurrently collected in full-length books. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and world view, the essays in this book investigate these artists' shared investments informal innovation and experimentation and in playing with question soft he auto biographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. This volume brings to gether eight original essays, including an extensive introduction, in addition to five republished interviews with the artists. Utilizing a variety of methodologies (archival work, gender theory, genre theory, etc.), the engagements in this book reflect how, despite the importance of finding “a place in side yourself” in order to create, this space is always, for better or worse, also as hared space, culled from, and subject to, surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities. Both the world of comics and its critics have been male-dominated for too long. The essays in this volume allow us to think about women’s place in the comics canon, while also appreciating Doucet and Bell as unique artists with powerful personal visions.