The Madame Paul Affair

In 2000, Julie Doucet—the singular cartoonist behind Drawn & Quarterly’s landmark series Dirty Plotte—launched The Madame Paul Affair, a single-issue comic that distills her raw, confessional style into a taut, surreal vignette. Written and drawn entirely by Doucet, this self-contained story follows a woman’s obsessive, increasingly unhinged fixation on a neighbor’s dog, blurring the line between mundane urban life and psychological unraveling. Though brief, the issue stands as a potent artifact of Doucet’s early-2000s work, showcasing her signature scratchy linework and unflinching exploration of female interiority. It matters as a compact, intense example of her influence on alternative comics, proving how much narrative power can fit into a single, perfectly crafted issue.