I was really excited to get a copy of this wonderful leporello by Doucet which consists of a 60ft long hand-drawn autobiographical narrative. I'm going to let the publisher's statement serve as the introduction to this great book:
"Julie Doucet had promised to stop writing comics and autobiography. Here she returns to her words with a fabulous immersive fresco. The year is 1989, Julie is 23 years old, she creates fanzines which she distributes to bookstores or by mail order. She then begins an intense epistolary relationship with one of her readers, a Frenchman who is doing his military service and whom she nicknames "the hussar". The two young people write hundreds of letters to each other and become enthusiastic about each other, until a trip to Europe offers them the opportunity to meet in the flesh...
Total Suicide reads and unfolds like an uninterrupted flow. No boxes, but pages saturated in an interweaving of known faces (Julie's in particular) and unknown faces, birds, animals, various objects - all drawn in ink - and which carries us away like a river to go back in time. The machine is a little rusty at the beginning and the author urges herself to draw, mentions her difficulty in handling words, before plunging - and us with her - into the flow of her memories to resurrect the intensity of the past feelings.
No more boards and boxes, Total Suicide was drawn in one piece. In order to best render this graphic performance, the book is presented in the form of a leporello which takes place over nearly 20 meters."
At the beginning of the book Doucet gives some rather interesting instructions for the reader, writing "the pages of this book having been drawn from the bottom to top, it is recommended to adapt the reading in this direction."
144 single-sided pages, individually 8" x 5" and when unfolded 60ft.
In the late 80s I was doing a project using a pseudonym (Janet Janet) and she published a zine called Schism. Doucet and Janet had an intense correspondence for a while in which we traded our zines and naturally I'm flattered that Janet Janet's name should surface in Doucet's reminiscenses from this period.
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