Flung Out of Space

 
Flung Out of Space
Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith
by Grace Ellis
art by Hannah Templer
Abrams Books

2022

 

 

Flung Out of Space is the graphic novel equivalent of a biopic - a lightly fictionalized account of its subject's life that attempts to faithfully portray real events in a comprehensible narrative. 

 
The book covers the period in Patricia Highsmith's life when she first became famous. In the beginning, she's working as an anonymous comic book author who's writing Strangers on a Train at home at night. She's also picking up women at a nearby bar.

 
Highsmith's public persona is smart, self-confident, and disdainful of anyone she considers her inferior (which extends to antisemitism and misogyny.) Privately, she's conflicted about her lesbianism. She likes flirting, likes sex, and is charismatic enough to make it look easy - but she feels guilty, considers herself mentally ill, and fears the social price she'd pay if she were found out.

 
Highsmith gets set up on a date with Stan Lee, and parlays the encounter into a second job writing for his comics company too. She uses the money to pay for a therapist, and later takes a seasonal job as a salesgirl at a department store to help afford it. She seems to fall in love with a woman she meets in group therapy, and also gets engaged to a man for the sake of respectability.

 
She finishes Strangers and her agent sells it to a publisher. It's a hit, and Hitchcock makes a movie of it. She gets her heart broken by her girlfriend, turns that into inspiration to write Carol. She meets with publishers to try to sell Carol, gets rejected over and over, until she finds someone willing to publish it under the guise of a pulp thriller. She breaks up with her boyfriend, quits therapy, quits comics, and finally goes to a lesbian bar instead of just her local. 

 
Templer's art is black, white, and grey, with shades of orange that seem to express the emotional intensity of the scene. We see visual representations of the thoughts that fill her head as she writes. The faces are expressive, perhaps especially when women are flirting.

 
It's funny to think of Patricia Highsmith as being part of the history of comics. I sort of doubt Stan Lee's biography would mention his one date with her as a significant turning point. She insisted on writing anonymously, so unless the companies she worked for kept impeccable records, we might never know exactly what she wrote. Templer uses the public domain hero The Black Terror to depict Highsmith's thoughts about superheroes. He is one of the characters Highsmith sometimes wrote for, and the skull logo on his costume fits well visually with her other violent thoughts.

 
Highsmith comes across as charismatic and compelling, but also so incredibly insecure and obsessed with status that it seems sad. She didn't want to be associated with comics or pulps, even publishing Carol under a pseudonym. Her internalized homophobia made her miserable, and she was contemptuous of other women and anyone who wasn't a WASP. 

 
I felt invested in what would happen to her though, and I really liked the art. Queer women, fans of Highsmith's writing, and maybe people interested in comic book history would probably all enjoy this one.