At The Paris Review, there’s an excerpt from a book by comics scholar Anne Elizabeth Moore on the work of French-Canadian underground cartoonist Julie Doucet:

Doucet’s work, overall, is nothing but destabilizing. It throws readers for loops; it brought momentum and new creators to independent comics; it inspired one of today’s most important publishers to develop solo-authored lines and thus acted as a flagship for the black-and-white boom even as it cleared a path for the graphic-novel boom a decade later; it changed our very presumptions about who can and will master the form of comics. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that Julie Doucet’s comics changed history. Yet what’s never been clear to anyone—the enduring mystery of the murderous home goods, if you will—is how much the upending of the form was ever truly the artist’s intention.