365 Reasons To Read Julie's New Book

Since I started at D+Q four years ago, the one question I am asked again and again is "Did Julie Doucet really quit comics?" (Runner-up question, "When is the next issue of Peepshow?) For all of you player haters who have lamented this fact like a jilted lover, but have inexplicably not read her new book 365 Days yet, here are a couple more reasons to get her new book and celebrate what she told Walrus Magazine last month "I need to write in a visual way... for example, with cut-out words. Writing is what I am all about."

1. The CBC presents a slide show of Julie's career written by Toronto comics journalist Guy Leshinski. "The book is honest and intimate, and very funny, as her comics were. It's a portrait of who she once was, and who, after all, she still is."

2. Time Out New York has a review this week where Hillary Chute concludes "Funny and unpretentious, Doucet is snappy and irritable and optimistic--often all at once."

3. The Hipster Book Club of LA states: "Her combination of naivete, insecurity and self-awareness make 365 Days incredibly compelling."

4. Our favorite pop culture blogger Whitney Matheson of USA Today Pop Candy gave this shout-out: "I'm infatuated with Julie Doucet's new book, 365 Days: A Diary. This comic diary is so inspiring that I've kept it in my purse so I can devour it on the go."

5. The print edition of Entertainment Weekly gave the book an A- and said "Days is cunningly crammed with ideas that range from the stress of designing rock-album art to anger about U.S. involvement in Iraq."

6. The Daily Crosshatch notes: "As a biographical work, 365 Days succeeds quite well, with an immediacy that strips down the boundaries that many authors often construct to distance themselves from their work, either the result of elapsed time or something more artificial designed to absorb some of the emotional immediacy."

7. And Alan Brisbort, the lone comic reviewer in the entire state of Connecticut, blogs for the Hartford Advocate states: "Julie Doucet fills every teensy corner of every page with oddities-squiggles, cut out letters (like a kidnapper's ransom note), marginal doodles, provocative collages, fortune cookie fortunes."

8. And the National Post of Canada tries to describe just what 365 Days is: "The book is a hybrid creature: part dream-diary, part daybook, part travelogue, rendered in illustration, words and collage."

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