Special Exits

Memoirs of Joyce Farmer chronicles the author's parents decline health, their relationships with each other and with their daughter, and how they cope with the day-to-day emotional fragility of the tax point in their lives.

Elderly parents Lara and Rachel, who enjoyed a long and loving family life together, find themselves in a thin, confident pen line. Located in the southern part of Los Angeles (which makes for a terrifying sequence as blind Rachel and ailing Lars are trapped in their house without electricity during 1992 Rodney King riots), backgrounds and props lovingly detailed: these objects serve as memory triggers for Lars and Rachel, even if they eventually suppress them and their house that couple hate to leave. Special outputs laid out in eight panel grid, creating a leisurely pace of the narrative, which not only helps to pass slowly, inexorably decline Lars "Health and Rachel, but fully reflects the tone of the exchanges between the long-married couple: affectionate disputes; their gallows humor; querulousness them as their bodies break down.

Although Lars and Rachel are the protagonists of special outputs, the farmer makes her voice known through creative visual metaphors in her indictment of careless treatment of elderly people in nursing homes. Special exits gracefully deal with the harsh reality of caring for aging loved ones: those who have been, or in similar situations may find comfort in it, and those who do not find a lot to admire the courage and sense of humor of Lars and Rachel.

Joyce Farmer, best known for co-creation of tits n clits comics anthology in 1970, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in the underground Comix, spent 11 years tirelessly Special outputs, graphic memoir in the spirit of Alison Bechdel fun at home or Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack Our Cancer Year, about caring for a dying father and stepmother.