As you can tell from the name, it was focused specifically on women’s sexuality, and intended as an alternative to the often sexist underground comix by men. Just weeks before Wimmen’s Comix was launched, Farmer started the series Tits & Clits with her friend Lyn Chevely which ran until 1987 (a few issues are also still available from Last Gasp). The collections focused on feminism, sex, and sexuality, and many well-known women cartoonists started their careers with their contributions to Wimmen’s Comix. (You can still get original issues for less than $2 from publisher Last Gasp - though if you’re not in the States shipping charges are steep.) Wimmen’s Comix was an important milestone in the history of women cartoonists. The memoir’s gritty seriousness and attention to the most mundane details of caring for aging parents is quite a shift from Farmer’s edgy, explicit early work.įarmer was a contributor to Wimmen’s Comix, the first ever ongoing collection of comics by women, which ran from 1972 to 1992. I wish I’d been more familiar with it myself before I read S pecial Exits, because then I would have been even more blown away by the book. I’ll get back to Special Exits in a minute, but first I want to make sure to tell you about her work from the 70s. Special Exits is Farmer’s first book-length comic, famously praised by Robert Crumb, but Farmer has been an important figure in comics since the 1970s.

Outside the world of underground comix enthusiasts, Joyce Farmer is probably best known for her latest work, Special Exits (Fantagraphics 2010), a memoir (though the names are changed) of her experience caring for her parents during the last few years of their lives.

Though Lars and Rachel are the protagonists of Special Exits, Farmer makes her voice known through creative visual metaphors and in her indictment of the careless treatment of the elderly in nursing homes.Joyce Farmer in Laguna Beach in November 2010.

Rendered in thin, confident pen lines, Special Exits is laid out in an eight-panel grid, which creates a leisurely storytelling pace that not only helps to convey the slow, inexorable decline in Lars' and Rachel's health, but perfectly captures the timbre of the exchanges between a long-married couple: the affectionate bickering their gallows humor their querulousness as their bodies break down. Set in southern Los Angeles (which makes for a terrifying sequence as blind Rachel and ailing Lars are trapped in their home without power during the 1992 Rodney King riots), backgrounds and props are lovingly detailed: these objects serve as memory triggers for Lars and Rachel, even as they eventually overwhelm them and their home, which the couple is loathe to leave. Special Exits chronicles the decline of Lara (Farmer's stand-in)'s elderly parents (Lars and Rachel)'s health.

Special Exits by Joyce Farmer