365 Days

I'm the kind of person that once I start reading something, even if I'm not getting much out of it, I tend to read all the way to the bitter end, hoping to find something worthwhile in there, or at least hoping to understand something new from the experience. I'd say I finish reading 99% of everything I start to read. Anyway, I was really looking forward to Julie Doucet's latest graphics novel, 365 Days, but after forcing myself to read nearly halfway through, I just can't continue, because without a doubt, this is the single most boring graphic novel I've ever tried to read.

I actually don't know if it's fair to call 365 Days a graphic novel. It's basically a collection of diary / journal / blog type pages that tend to be filled with as much text as pictures. The first problem is how banal and dull most of the text is. The second problem is the drawings that could / should maybe liven up the text, are at least as uninspiring. If 365 Days were published as a blog, I would have stopped reading after the first week. Instead it has been published as a thirty dollar book - which is frankly unforgivable.

Spending that much money on this collection, I felt a certain obligation to continue reading, hoping things would pick up, but almost to the halfway point I must resign. The way Doucet describes her days is just too amazingly boring. The book is filled with uncreative whining. A typical entry involves a comment on the weather, a note about going to her studio, a paragraph worrying about receiving a grant, and maybe a detail on what she did for dinner. Essentially the same information is repeated throughout way too many of the strips - especially considering the information isn't interesting in the least. The drawing too is very much the same. Either a boring abstract design, or sort of ugly, cartoony drawings of herself or her friends. Obsessive detail fills up every nook and cranny of every page, but almost none of it has any life. The book is filled with the kind of minute, boring daily life stuff that one would imagine, even the author herself wouldn't be interested in reading a second time - the kind of stuff if even your best friend was going on and on about on the phone, you would decide, actually I think I'll never call that person again. Why the publisher would think anybody else would be interested in this stuff is beyond me. A very, very disappointing purchase.