Special exits - Joyce Farmer

Compared favourably to the work of Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar, Joyce Farmer's exquisite and tender recollections of her parents' struggle with old age is re-issued in a paperback edition. Set in Los Angeles in the early '90s, Parker recalls the inexorable decline of her parents' health against a backdrop of wider social unrest. Their affectionate bickering, black humour and tender resignation to fading youth are captured perceptively and truthfully by Farmer, in what is widely regarded as one of the finest graphic memoirs ever produced.