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 doubly-gutsy move when you consider that Forney’s subject matter here is well and truly of the “life-or-death” variety.

Fortunately for the cartoonist and her readership, she backs up her claim of “brilliance” from first page to last with a treasure-trove of highly practical reflections on dealing with difficult mental health realities that any bipolar person, or anyone who knows and/or loves a bipolar person, can both relate to and, crucially, benefit from.

You’ll learn a new word along the way, too (hell, it’ll be drilled into your head) : “SMEDMERTS,” a developed-on-the-fly shorthand acronym for Sleep Meds Eat Doctor Mindfulness Exercise Routine Tools Support System. And in a very real sense, an exploration of each facet of the “SMEDMERTS” equation forms the backbone of this book — and it’s a “rock steady” one at that.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, then, this isn’t so much a “narrative” per se — although there are a small handful of highly effective “slice-of-life” vignettes interspersed throughout — as it is a combination guidebook/self-help manual/support tool gleaned from Forney’s own personal experiences, illustrated with a kind of graceful and expressive simplicity, for a specific audience, that being either folks with bipolar disorder themselves, the people in their lives, or even folks who simply want to understand the subject with a greater degree of depth. It adopts a conversational tone from the outset — no lecturing here — and can even be charming when it needs to be, but it never forgets that it’s got an extremely important job to do, and you never get the sense that Forney is taking things lightly even if she frequently uses a combination of humor and surprising frankness to put readers at ease, a necessary step when dealing with something so inherently weighty.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about what Forney manages to achieve here, though — okay, aside from the fact that it might just save a few lives — is how smooth and eminently readable a flow it maintains, certainly no easy task for a book that is about the nuts-and-bolts of managing challenging life situations. Absent a real story “thread” that connects everything together this is a tricky thing to pull off, but damn, this is such a deftly-constructed and casually-related book that it genuinely attains something very akin to “page-turner” status. So “brilliant” doesn’t just refer to the practical advice Forney offers, but to her cartooning ability, as well.

So what do we have here, if not a “comic story,” a “graphic novel,” or even a “memoir”? How about this — Rock Steady is a unique work that incorporates elements of all three just-referenced forms of media to create something new and unique : a cartoon handbook on surviving the ups and downs of bipolar disorder by someone who’s been there and wants to empower and assist others by sharing what she’s learned. And yes, it’s pretty damn brilliant.