TIME ZONE J, by Julie Doucet
REMOVED FROM SPACE: Inspired by the indecent adventures of Patricia Highsmith, by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer
Goodness gracious: Julie Doucet has a new graphic novel out! This is shocking news. Doucet has been known since the 1990s for the brutally candid, aggressively complex “Dirty Plotte” and a host of other books, but Doucet stopped drawing more than 20 years ago. This long period of silence has of course given her a staggering prestige in the comic book world. Last month, she became the third woman to ever receive the Grand Prix Lifetime Achievement Award at Angoulême’s renowned International Comics Festival.
Not surprisingly, her new work, TIME ZONE J (signed & quarterly, 144 pp.† $29.95, is about memory – specifically a particular cluster of memories from the days when she was still making comics. She digs up and spreads her memories of a love affair she started in 1989, when she first drew ‘Dirty Plotte’. In fact, she literally spreads them out: she fills each page completely, stretching across the page boundaries and even sweeping the uncut edges of the book, as if she were working on a single long roll. That’s one of the many ways “Time Zone J” is establishing its space on the sidewalk. With dense compositions rendered in thick black ink (Doucet still draws like she did in the ’90s, as if trying to shoot through your skull and stamp her decal onto your brain), this is a book that won’t be ignored or denied .
It’s kind of sad, then, that it came out on the same day as another slightly less impactful feminist book – this one by two relative youngsters. Grace Ellis and Hannah Templers REMOVED FROM SPACE: Inspired by the indecent adventures of Patricia Highsmith (Abrams ComicArts, 199 pp., $24.99) doesn’t deserve to be overshadowed by the spectacular resurgence of an icon. It’s a deftly told, funny and sad story about a great lesbian writer’s struggle to find herself amid the collective psychological lockdown of the late 1940s and 1950s. Before selling “Strangers on a Train” to Hollywood and creating “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Highsmith wrote comic books (some for the great Stan Lee, pre-Marvel) to pay for conversion therapy. “Flung Out of Space” is practically an anti-“Plotte”. Drawn with a stylus, the lines are neat and smooth, not jittery and barely leashed like Doucet’s. It is biography rather than memoir, impersonal rather than egocentric. Even the fact that it’s the work of a writer-artist team sets it apart from Doucet’s 90s authorism.
Templer’s spare lines may not be as emotional as Doucet’s, but they’re ideal for this mid-century story. She eliminates the filth that would have characterized places like Marie’s, the gay bar Highsmith frequents; her sterile spaces reflect Highsmith’s alienation and physical deprivation. Templer seems influenced by Annie Goetzinger, whose “Girl in Dior” also had a sleek, mid-century look and setting. Templer’s work is more stylized than Goetzinger’s, and she imbues her characters with more idiosyncrasy and energy. When Highsmith meets the woman who will be her inspiration for her lesbian novel “The Price of Salt” — a goddess in full 50s feminine routine, filling a page radiantly — well. No one could have done it better.