Canadian artist Julie Doucet has been awarded the Grand Prix d’Angouleme by a vote of 1,820 of her peers. The announcement was made at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, which is held in the medieval town of Angouleme in France. 

The Grand Prix, which recognizes a cartoonist for her lifetime achievement, comes on the eve of the release of Doucet’s new graphic novel, Time Zone J, her first inked comic in over 20 years. The book will be published by Drawn and Quarterly, which has been publishing Doucet’s work since 1991, when they picked up her previously self-published comic Dirty Plotte. In 2018 they published a collection of her autobiographical comics, Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet (see “D&Q Collects Independent Comics Masters in 2018”); the French edition is one of the nominees for another award at the festival.

In 2006, Doucet stopped drawing comics; in a 2018 interview with the Montreal Gazette, she said it had become a job, and she was tired of working at it all the time. However, she continued to work in a variety of media, and in 2016 Drawn and Quarterly published her Carpet Sweeper Tales, a collage comic created from Italian photo comics and other sources (see “New Titles from Brown, Hanawalt, Doucet, Jones”). Time Zone J, her return to inked comics, will be published on April 19 and will have an MSRP of $29.95.

In other Angouleme news, Kat Leyh’s Snapdragon, published in the U.S. by First Second in 2020, won the award for best graphic novel for young people aged 10 to 16. Other graphic novels that have already been honored include Blacksad: They All Fall Down, which Dark Horse will publish in July (see “Deets on New Dark Horse ‘Blacksad’ Release”); Vol. 2 of Charles Burns’ Dedales, which has not yet been published in English; Henry McCausland’s Eight-Lane Runaways, published in 2020 by Fantagraphics; Junji Ito’s Sensor; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Trial of Krang; Rutu Modan’s Tunnels (see “New Graphic Novel from Rutu Modan”); Familiar Face, by Michael DeForge (see “Drawn and Quarterly Unveils Winter 2020 Catalog”); and Robo Sapiens, published in English by Seven Seas and one of our picks for manga of the year (see “10 Best Manga of 2021”); 

Any graphic novel published in French is eligible for the Angouleme awards, regardless of its country of origin. More awards will be announced during the course of the festival, which runs through March 20.