Joyce Farmer

Joyce Farmer (born Joyce Farmer; 1938 in Los Angeles, California) is an American underground comix cartoonist. She was a participant in the underground comix movement. With Lyn Chevli, she created the feminist anthology comic book series Tits & Clits Comix in 1972.

Joyce Farmer was born in 1938. Some of her earliest work is signed Joyce Sutton, causing people to believe this is her actual name. In reality this was the name of her husband to whom she was married. She changed her legal name back to Farmer in the mid 1970s.

In addition to Tits & Clits, Farmer helped produce an underground comic about abortion, Abortion Eve, in 1973. She also contributed to the other all-woman comic, Wimmen's Comix.

Never making any money from underground comics, Farmer struggled through the 1970s and 1980s in a turbulent marriage, often acting as a single mother. Dropping out of comics after the final issue of Tits & Clits, in the late 1980s and 1990s Farmer worked as a bail bondsman and took care of her aging father and stepmother.

In 2000, her work was published in the Fantagraphics anthology Zero Zero. Remarried and living in Laguna Beach, Farmer began documenting in comics form the sad and sometimes humorous episodes of her parents' final years, sending samples to former fellow underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. Crumb convinced her to finish the book, and sent it to Fantagraphics, who published it in 2010 under the title Special Exits.

In 2011, Special Exits won the National Cartoonists Society's Graphic Novel Award.