What Backderf and his friends didn’t realize was that Dahmer was going slowly insane. They actually had a Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club. He became a running gag with Backderf and his gang, not so much a friend as a kind of freak-show mascot. He developed a comic routine consisting of “fake epileptic fits and…the slurred speech and spastic tics of someone with cerebral palsy.” This didn’t make him popular, but it elevated him slightly above the status of nonentity. “He was,” Backderf writes, “the loneliest kid I’d ever met.” But in high school Dahmer changed - some. It starts with the art: The psychedelic wavy highlights Backderf draws on glass are like Proust’s madeleine to anybody who was alive in the 1970’s, and the way Backderf draws people owes a lot to Mad magazine’s Don Martin, who everybody tried to copy in their notebooks back when I was in grade school: His characters all have those long, angular heads and exaggeratedly articulated joints.īackderf met Dahmer in junior high, where Dahmer occupied the lowest social rung available - he was a nerd, a spaz, a non-person. Because it turns out that My Friend Dahmer is the most devastatingly accurate fictional evocation of my childhood since Freaks & Geeks. But as I kept reading (and I read the book in a single sitting, even though I was on deadline for something totally unrelated) a very different kind of horror began to dawn on me. I wanted to read stories about Dahmer being a creepy creep in high school so I could think, oh my God, how could they be so blind, why didn’t somebody stop him, etc. It’s now being re-published in expanded form, and I’m here to tell you, it’s astounding.Īnd yeah, I opened it just for the creepiness factor. Crumb, Alison Bechdel, James Ellroy and Chuck Klosterman. It became a cult classic: fans include R. What are the odds?)Īfter Dahmer was arrested in 1991, Backderf began working on a comic about him, which he eventually self-published in 2002. (According to Wikipedia, Bath has one other famous son: Lebron James. One of his high school classmates was Jeffrey Dahmer, who went on to kill 17 people.
The guy who wrote and drew My Friend Dahmer, Derf Backderf, grew up in a small, rural town in Ohio called Bath in the 1970s. It’s kind of unnerving when that work of literature is a graphic novel called My Friend Dahmer. Follow a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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