She's a comics lifer, even if much of her recent output has been as an illustrator. Forney has plenty of alt-comics bona fides, from her delightful Tomato comic in the '90s, her hilarious childhood memoir Monkey Food, the amusing short story collection I Love Led Zeppelin, to Lust, her collection of clever illustrations for The Stranger. It's about her experience being treated for bipolar disorder (aka manic depression). That's why it was so refreshing to read Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me. It's less a story than it is a therapy journal comic, but Forney's instincts as an entertainer kick in even on the dreariest of pages. Life and death is big business, after all. As someone who has long found autobiographical comics to be rewarding on any number of levels, some of these books feel like a distressingly cynical way to make money on the part of the publishers. I'll rattle off a few titles in this vein: Cancer Vixen, Stitches, The Impostor's Daughter (perhaps the most egregiously manipulative example of this sub-genre). An alarming number of them have come from first-time long-form cartoonists and are aimed squarely at the sort of mainstream reader who enjoys this sort of confessional, miserabilist but ultimately triumphant story about tragedy and unfortunate circumstances.

A cynic might say that many of them derive their hook from being about death, illness, abuse, tragedy, etc.

A lot of 'graphic novels' coming out from major publishers these days really seem to be variations on the graphic memoir.

Marbles mania