Sacco’s short pieces from recent years are collected in JOURNALISM (Metropolitan/Holt, $29) - the title is itself an argument, since he’s got some strong opinions on the subject. The extensive research and dramatic pacing of Kurtzman’s fiction make it the distant ancestor of Joe Sacco’s comics reportage.

The kids who picked up Kurtzman’s “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat” looking for militaristic thrills must have rushed home to throw their toy guns away. The title story ends with a Korean soldier’s body floating downstream while the American who’s just drowned him trembles with shame “Big ‘If’!” is a monologue from a soldier struck by an errant shell, sobbing as he bleeds to death alone. Kurtzman’s writing could be bombastic - nearly all of these stories’ titles end in exclamation points - but, as the United States became mired in the Korean War, his reeling disgust at the horrors of war (and his thick, slashing brush strokes) made for shockingly bold rhetoric. CORPSE ON THE IMJIN! And Other Stories (Fantagraphics, $28.99) collects brief tales he wrote and sometimes drew for 10-cent war comics between 19. Harvey Kurtzman is usually remembered as the satirical genius who helped create Mad magazine, but his early tours de force are much bleaker stuff. The bulk of “Marbles” documents her wobbly progress toward stability, with interpolated drawings from her journals and occasional side trips into the history of “crazy artists.” It’s not exactly focused, but it’s mostly delightful: Forney switches up the style and layout of her artwork every page or two, and she’s got enough perspective on herself to find some kind of comedy even in painful experiences.

As she explains, her frantic, volatile high moods seemed to fuel her art her crushing lows made it nearly impossible for her to make it, or do anything else and the desperately inexact science of medication, she once feared, might rob her of the creativity she cherished. That inspiration may have come at an awful cost, she suggests in MARBLES: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (Gotham, paper, $20), a memoir of her long tango, or wrestling match, with bipolar disorder. Ellen Forney’s greatest strength as a cartoonist is her gift for explanation - getting information across with vigor, wit and visual inventiveness.

Graphic novel marbles