20/01/2021
The cartoonists making mental health their muse
Comics are not just about superheroes. Emily Oomen meets the artists shaping graphic medicine - a genre focused on the experience of living with illness.
Ellen Forney was in her twenties and working as a professional cartoonist when she stumbled into the world of graphic medicine.
The artist had been working for one of Seattle's long-running newspapers The Stranger when, in 1998 and just before she turned 30, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
She says the diagnosis "sank in like the sun had gone behind the clouds".
Comics had always been a familiar language and format for Forney. She turned to them looking for comfort and was excited to discover a new genre she had never heard of - graphic medicine.
The genre focuses on and discusses topics within the medical field from cancer to Alzheimer's and anorexia in an engaging and entertaining way.
Although developed for patients and medical professionals as a way to explore different conditions, it is now often found in general stores and libraries.
Forney who was comfortable telling stories through this medium, started to create comics for herself about her experience of living with mental illness.
"I wrote a lot in my journals," she says. "I didn't know that those were going to be pieces of a comic, a memoir later, but it's kind of how it comes out of me, in words and pictures."
She says it gave her great solace while she learned to manage the condition.
After several years of creating comics for herself she designed a graphic memoir of the experience - Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.
"I felt like I needed to do it for myself and to get it out there to reach other people - because I can, because I'm a storyteller, and I thought it was an important story to tell.
"It's not just 'here's my experience, that was a mess', but how do we put those pieces together? How do we come to heal?"
One story in Marbles, illustrated in black and white, tells the moment where Forney noticed her mood had lifted after she had starting taking a new antidepressant.
Standing in the shower she realised the water droplets looked like lanterns at a night festival and said the joy she felt at seeing images-within-images made her feel that things were looking up.
Making the memoir, "was a very, very thorough excavation of my experience," Forney says. "I felt like I came to understand [my bipolar disorder] and wrap my head around it better.
"An important part of what we have as a storyteller is...we can offer, if not solutions, at least the possibility of hope."
The memoir, published in 2012 is now considered part of the graphic medicine canon.
Forney, who has taught the art of comics at the Cornish College of the Arts since 2002, has also created artwork for Seattle's Capitol Hill light rail station and collaborated on the award-winning illustrated novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
But graphic medicine remains an important part of her life. She recently published her latest book, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life which is a self-help survival guide full of tips, tricks, and tools that can help those living with bipolar disorder thrive.
