You’ve gotta hand it to Ellen Forney : she’s got guts.

Any reader of her previous, highly personal and confessional graphic memoir, Marbles : Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, And Me would more than likely second that opinion, but it wasn’t her bravura work on that book that I had in mind when making that statement — nor, specifically, was I thinking of the contents of her just-released-by-Fantagraphics follow-up volume, Rock Steady. What the hell am I on about, then?

I’m “on about” her new book’s subtitle : Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. Think about it for a second — if you were the author of a work, would you have the sheer self-confidence and spinal fortitude to put call it “brilliant” yourself? That kind of thing is usually left to the “pull-quote” blurbs the publisher slaps on the front and/or back cover, is it not? And it’s a…

Don’t look now, but Aline Kominsky-Crumb is having what the media has, in recent years, come to call “a moment” — and those of us who have been following her extraordinary cartooning career over the decades can only say : “it’s about fucking time.”

Through no fault of her own, Kominsky-Crumb has almost always operated in her (in?) famous husband’s shadow to one degree or another, and while the arcs of their respective careers have definitely either dove-tailed or run parallel to each other from time to time — they were both involved with (hell, they both edited, albeit at different points in its run) legendary underground anthology Weirdo, they collaborated on Self-Loathing Comics back in the 1990s, etc. — in truth their work, even though they both have figured as prominent characters in each others’ strips, focuses on entirely separate sets of concerns. Sort of.

Okay, yeah…