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Rx

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‘You wont know the shape of your unravelling until it happens’ says Rachel Lindsay’s disheveled comic avatar, sitting on her bed in a breeze-block room of the mental hospital to which she has just been committed. ‘But you probably have some idea what it looks like’ adds her previous corporate self, from the advertising office where she was in charge of marketing antidepressants. Rachel’s fall has been sudden and dramatic: from well-paid, corporate ‘suit’ to ranting unemployed maniac, shouting obscenities at authority and at her concerned parents. It is not often, nowadays, that I find myself unable to put down… Read More

Look Straight Ahead

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Elaine Will is a Canadian cartoonist who just completed a graphic novel entitled ‘Look Straight Ahead’ about a teen boy’s struggle with depression/bipolar disorder. You can read it online here, for the time being: http://blog.e2w-illustration.com It’s been getting rave reviews…Kevin Bramer of Optical Sloth said “for a first graphic novel, it’s damn near perfect” and that it was “required reading for anyone who knows someone dealing with mental illness.” It’s also in the current Diamond Previews catalogue. If it gets enough orders, it will be officially released in print form in November. Elaine is also planning another graphic novel that… Read More

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me

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Reviewed by Michelle N. Huang, The Pennsylvania State University Ellen Forney poetically describes the manic episodes of her bipolar disorder as electrifying: “the sensation that my mind was spinning and overheating would sometimes build to a sensation like an electrical short—a burst of light, a melting or dissipating—.” Reading Forney’s graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, produces a similarly charged encounter. The reader experiences not only Ellen’s exhilarating highs—the extravagant book launch parties, the professional success—but also her devastatingly dark lows—the blank periods of time where she is unable to move herself from the couch. Marbles captures Forney’s… Read More