Suicide Total

Suicide Total – Julie Doucet had promised to give up comics and autobiography. Now she’s back with a fabulous immersive fresco. It’s 1989, Julie is 23 years old, and she produces fanzines that she distributes in bookshops or by mail order. She began an intense epistolary relationship with one of her readers, a Frenchman doing his military service whom she nicknamed “le hussard”. The two young people write hundreds of letters to each other and become enthusiastic about each other, until a trip to Europe gives them the chance to meet in the flesh…

Suicide Total reads and unfolds like an uninterrupted flow. No boxes, but pages saturated in a tangle of familiar faces (Julie’s in particular) and strangers, birds, animals and various objects – all drawn in ink – that sweep us along like a river going back in time. The machine is a little rusty at first, and the author urges herself to draw, evoking her difficulty with words, before plunging – and we with her – into the flood of her memories to resurrect the intensity of past feelings.

Gone are the plates and boxes of Suicide Total, drawn as a single unit. In order to best render this graphic performance, the book is presented in the form of a leporello that unfurls over almost 20 meters.