Tuesday, May 6, 2008

An Old Story featuring Julie Doucet

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I met Julie Doucet the summer of 1992 in Seattle when my boyfriend Aaron and I printed up a comic book compilation called "Hot Flying Spunk" (we glued a plastic fly on the cover of each one) and decided to go out to Seattle and become comic book artists.

We stayed at a different friend's places, slept in a hammock in a backyard, made art, postered stuff up late at night, hawked our comic books on the street, drew comics and went to Fantagraphic and Sub Pop parties and met Pete Bagge and Julie Doucet and James Sturm (hmm...James now teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies) and all kinds of other cool artists and musicians (one band played pants-less at a warehouse party--that was a good time). It was a really interesting summer.One night Aaron and Julie and I and another guy did a big Exquisite Corpse project..it was our favorite thing to play...each of us painted a big 4'x4' head, torso and legs without showing anyone else what we were working on and the jumbled them up and put them all together. The result was pretty stunning and around 3am we ran into the U district and postered them up on the most conspicuous wall we could find.

Sadly, when we woke up in the morning to go back and look at our work it had already been painted over. We were pretty mad. We never even got photo-proof of it. It was the last day I saw Julie I think too. She and I had a lot of the same things happen to us that summer and it was nice always, so nice to talk together when we hung around. I met a lot of girls that summer but she was the only friend I could really talk to.We were pen-pals for a while and she used to send great letters with 70's magazine pages with drawings on them or funny collages enclosed. Her dreamy autobiographical work inspired a whole slew of girls to work honestly without holding back. I think Julie kind of came first.

Find Julie's work here. I suggest reading every Dirty Plotte issue you can find and also her New York Diary.

So Julie, if you google yourself and find this, hi from Deb. We're ladies now, huh?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have a copy of "Hot Flying Spunk". A girl I used to know purchased it from someone on the street here in Seattle. I'll have to dig it out again sometime. I think it still has the original wrapper with the plastic fly glued to it.