Dirty Plotte...a gorgeously designed box set offering two hardcover volumes collecting Doucet’s entire comics oeuvre, arrives at an opportune moment. It’s a lavish history lesson for those who might take today’s outpouring of feminist comics for granted, returning readers to the skimpier landscape of the 1990s, when Doucet’s work, in both concept and style, broke new ground. Its aesthetic echoes forebears like Lynda Barry and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, yet its execution and vision are different. (Doucet’s dense panels, full of precise, stylized shading and characterized by heavy black-and-white contrast, swarm with details; they appear as the comics equivalent of a deep focus shot, the film technique used by Orson Welles and others in which the foreground, middle-ground and background are all in focus. In Doucet’s comics, a coffee cup has personality; the objects in a room seem to dance.) And while most of the material dates from 20 to 30 years ago—Doucet abandoned comics in 2000—the wonderment and rage at virulently gendered behavior feels fresh, and relevant for this moment. The physicality of Doucet’s work is still shocking ... It’s a darkly funny, jolting vaudeville.

Louche, mordant, funny, and surreal, Dirty Plotte comprises a mix of short and long comics—wordless and with dialogue, narrative and plotless, autobiographical and fictional (and everything between)—in which there are no rules. Nor are any subjects off-limits ... these comics are as pertinent and captivating today as when they first made their way into the culture ... Doucet’s parodic depictions of intense violence are still unsettling; her elastic treatment of sex and gender is still daring; and her open-ended treatment of female identity is still vital ... if the environment of Dirty Plotte is acutely Doucet’s own—relying primarily on dreams, fantasies, and imagined scenarios starring a version of herself—it is also freewheeling enough that readers, particularly women, can recognize something of themselves in it ... in calling out her fantasies and fears with words and pictures on the page, Doucet uses transgression to carve out a space of power and freedom. She revels in the joy of unfettered exploration, and her enthusiasm buoys otherwise dark subject matter ... Doucet’s distinctiveness is equally due to her highly graphic drawing style: packed, rambunctious black-and-white panels depicting cramped interiors swarming with bric-a-brac and busy street scenes alive with eccentric humanity.

With 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.

Through her instantly authoritative characters, Doucet seeks less to tell a story than to contradict or augment her own mental positions. Perhaps comics are not so much a narrative form but a thinking one. Sex and the nonidealized life of the body is a thought throughout Plotte (menstruation, shitting, nose picking are often on view), but it’s an aspect of Doucet’s mind, not the feature itself ... Dirty Plotte documents Doucet’s genius on two fronts: the early issues are revolutionary, flowing from the diverse web of thought that she transcribed into her panels. Later, we have one of the best modern takes on the wing of comics laid down at the medium’s inception by the likes of Bud Fisher and George Herriman: caricatured storytelling, updated with a charge of contemporary life.

In her groundbreaking 1990s series, Dirty Plotte, Doucet delineated an aesthetic that was brazen, clever, funny, and broke taboos like they were cheap ceramic plates. Reading her comics, you could be excused for wishing you had an ounce of her fearlessness, at least when it came to putting ink on paper ... yet despite the gore and excess, there is a comical playfulness to Doucet’s work that belies (but does not completely negate) those transgressive aspects. Her panels are always bustling with activity and clutter; every object on the street or in her apartment seems capable of coming to life (and does in one particular comic) ... That sense of playfulness extends to her general amusement with the human body, particularly genitalia ... Doucet frequently crosses gender barriers herself in her stories, imagining herself as a man ... But if her attitude towards male anatomy is amused, her attitude towards men in general is decidedly less positive. The men in Doucet’s comics are shiftless and unreliable at best, malevolent and violent at worst.

...a startling body of work that further deepens Doucet's place in the comics cannon ... Doucet's creative id, whether awake or asleep, knows few boundaries—or rather seeks out boundaries to challenge ... Doucet's visual style is comical. These are cartoons in the exaggerated sense, impossible anatomy that evokes the human proportions it warps. The heads of Doucet figures are roughly 1/5th their height, so roughly double the size of human heads. They pose and move in clunky, almost Peanuts-esque shapes. The artistic choice often reduces the level of discomfort in each scene ... To be clear, the 'Complete' in the collection's title refers only to Dirty Plotte and similar work she produced at roughly the same time ... Wandering back through the '90s again, it's often unclear why certain material was included in Dirty Plotte and other material wasn't.

Doucet’s influential indie comic, originally distributed as a photocopied zine, receives a high-end presentation in this lavish boxed set ... all that a hardcore devotee could want. This spectacular volume of a seminal feminist work, despite its steep price, should hold appeal beyond collectors and libraries as a show-off coffee-table gift full of ’90s nostalgia.