... having been breathed out

Always keen on advancement, Pat[ricia Highsmith, already working as a comics scriptwriter at Timely and other companies], tried to write for the high-paying, widely distributed Wonder Woman comic book, but was shut out of the job. This was in 1947, just one year before she began to imagine her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. Wonder Woman, daughter of Amazon Queen Hippolyta and still the heroine of her own comic book, has a favorite exclamation: “Suffering Sappho!” She lives on the forbidden-to-males Paradise Island with a happy coepheroi of lithe young Amazons, and she arrived in America in 1942, in the form of her Altar Ego, Lieutenant Diana Prince, to help the Allies fight World War II. The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of Wonder Woman’s bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 2: How to Begin, Part 2)

Inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets, indeed.

And a little bonus anecdote about Highsmith’s time at Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel:

1943: Vince Fago, her editor at Timely, tries to arrange a date for her with another comic book writer, Stan Lee. Neither Lee nor Pat is interested, so Spider-Man (the superhero Stan Lee cocreated) misses his opportunity to date Tom Ripley (the antihero Pat Highsmith created).