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Ellen Forney (born March 8, 1968) is an American cartoonist, educator, and wellness coach. She is known for her autobiographic comics which include I Was Seven in '75; I Love Led Zepellin; and Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me. She teaches at the Cornish College of the Arts. Her work covers mental illness, political activism, drugs, and the riot grrrl movement. As of 2019, she is based in Seattle, Washington.
In the 1990s, she produced the autobiographical strip I Was Seven in '75, which ran in Seattle's alternative-weekly paper The Stranger. She self-published a collection in 1997 with a Xeric Foundation grant. A complete collection was published as Monkey Food by Fantagraphics in 1999.
In 2006 she published I Love Led Zeppelin, which collected comics she had done for various newspapers and magazines, and included collaborations with Margaret Cho, Kristin Gore, Camille Paglia, and Dan Savage. It was nominated for an Eisner Award as Best Reality-Based Comic. The Comics Reporter[2] In 2007 she illustrated Sherman Alexie's young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award. In 2008 she published Lust which adapted personal ads from The Stranger into illustrated/comics form.
Her Graphic novel Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (2025). 9781592407323, Penguin. ISBN 9781592407323 addressed her experiences with bipolar disorder.Klein, Sarah. "What Bipolar Disorder Really Feels Like," Huffpost (September 18, 2014). Specifically, the memoir deals with how Forney perceives her mental illness in relation to her art, as well as her fears about medication diminishing her creativity. Forney also notes the role mental illness has played in other artists lives, referring to a list of artists and writers with depression as "Club Van Gogh." It was published by Penguin Books' Gotham Books imprint in November 2012, The Bipolar Cartoonist: Ellen Forney’s ‘Marbles’, Publishers Weekly. By Grace Bello. November 05, 2012. Retrieved November 17, 2012.David Low, Forney ’89 Writes Graphic Novel on Bipolar Disorder, The Wesleyan Connection (Wesleyan University), 2012-11-15. Accessed 2012-11-17. and it was a New York Times Bestseller. Marbles featured prominently in a graphic medicine exhibit that Forney curated for the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Forney's 2018 book Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life is a graphic self-help guide, published by Fantagraphics. In it, Forney promotes her personal acronym for self-care: SMEDMERTS, which stands for Sleep, Meds, Eat, Doctor, Mindfulness, Exercise, Routine, Tools, Support System.
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