Before she sold “Strangers on a Train” to Hollywood and created “The Talented Mr. It’s a deftly told, funny and sad tale of a great lesbian writer’s struggle to find herself amid the collective psychological lockdown of the late 1940s and ’50s.

Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer’s FLUNG OUT OF SPACE: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith (Abrams ComicArts, 199 pp., $24.99) doesn’t deserve to be overshadowed by an icon’s spectacular re-emergence. It’s a little bit sad, then, that it dropped on the same day as another, somewhat less impactful feminist book - this one by two relative youngsters. With dense compositions rendered in thick black ink (Doucet still draws as she did in the ’90s, as if she’s trying to blast through your skull and stamp her emblem on your brain), this is a book that won’t be ignored or denied. That’s one of many ways “Time Zone J” establishes its space on the pavement. She digs up and spreads out her recollections of a love affair she embarked on in 1989, when she was first drawing “Dirty Plotte.” She spreads them out quite literally, in fact: She fills up every page completely, drawing across page boundaries and even smudging onto the book’s uncut edges, as if she’s working on a single long scroll. Not surprisingly, her new work, TIME ZONE J (Drawn & Quarterly, 144 pp., $29.95), is about memory - specifically, a particular cluster of memories from back when she was still making comics. Just last month she became the third woman ever awarded the Grand Prix lifetime achievement award at the distinguished Angoulême International Comics Festival. This long quiet period has, naturally, accorded her a staggering level of prestige in the comics world. Renowned since the ’90s for the brutally frank, aggressively complex “ Dirty Plotte” as well as numerous other books, Doucet quit drawing more than 20 years ago. Goodness gracious: Julie Doucet has a new graphic novel out! This is staggering news. FLUNG OUT OF SPACE: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith, by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer

Hannah templer