Rarely have I read a more captivating biography and rarely have I read so beautiful a comic. Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer is  a magnificent work about a deeply flawed and complex person….a person who would likely have loathed this book about herself.

Patricia Highsmith is a name well-known in older lesbian circles as the real name of Claire Morgan, the author of the first lesbian novel with a happy ending published in the United States. That novel, The Price of Salt, was one of my foundational novels as a young lesbian, as it has been for many others. It was made into the fabulously well-done movie Carol, which I have reviewed here. But to the rest of the world she is far, far more famous as the author of suspense novels, the first of which, Strangers on a Train, was made into a rather famous movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

That said, Patricia Highsmith is not the hero we need. Even if we take away the obvious stress of being a lesbian in a time where that was understood to be a form of mental illness, Highsmith was an unpleasant person; anti-Semitic, racist, and often extremely nasty to the few people around her she could call friends. Ellis addresses this in the foreword, but the script isn’t nearly vulgar enough to have any impact. One can see that they were juggling the idea of making her a bigoted harridan and a semi-sympathetic protagonist, but failed. There’s really no way to sugar-coat hatred and give it any impact, sadly. 

What did have impact was Templer’s art. Templer portrayed Highsmith’s life in three different templates, using one style for the day-to-day experiences, a second for the comic book scenarios Highsmith was cooking up for her job with Timely Comics, while struggling with her sexuality and her writing career. Her suspense novels are given a third style, and they and comics alternately fill Highsmith’s head as she balances all of these things with an increasingly difficult life as a lesbian.

Ellis and Templer’s portrayal of Highsmith is, simply, outstanding. We are left with a very heartfelt portrait of a miserable person who did little to many anyone else happier than she. Highsmith would have hated this book, which is why I love it to much. It’s more sympathetic to her than she ever was to anyone, including herself.

Ratings: 

Art – 10
Story – 10
Writing – 9 Balancing the shittiness of a shitty person with making a books people want to read is hard. 
LGBTQ+  – 9 Highsmith might have been happier if she was alive now…or she might not

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for an excellent Pride month read in comic form, I’m going to strongly recommend you reach for this comic. It’s only weakness is that it is just slightly too kind for the real Patricia Highsmith, which works just fine.