RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWith a visual style and an approach to storytelling that are both anchored in the grotesque, Doucet’s comics serve as a direct kick in the groin to dominant notions of feminine propriety and good taste in general ... Doucet’s short comics mix the wildly imaginative with the intensely personal. Common to especially the early stories is an uncompromising sense of anything-goes dream logic; and although her comics consistently challenge masculine perspectives by depicting female unruliness and bodily messiness, the joyously freewheeling and often curiously innocent nature of her work means that it is never in danger of succumbing to a dull and programmatic version of feminism. Instead, Doucet’s emphasis on untraditional, in-your-face expressions of femininity means that her comics are closer in spirit to the riot grrrl–inflected feminism of the grunge era ... Dirty Plotte brings to light the sheer volume and consistency of vision in Doucet’s comics work, all of which was produced in little more than a decade ... It affirms Doucet’s status as a groundbreaking and taboo-demolishing antecedent to today’s women cartoonists, many of whom approach comics making with a similar lack of self-consciousness about the form’s ability to depict the realities of lived female experience.
