My Friend Dahmer: A Graphic Novel Memoir

In "My Friend Dahmer" Derf Backderf has created a work that should be required reading for all school counselors, educators, and indeed anyone with an interest in the psychology of alienated outsiders. This is probably the single best work on the early origins of a serial killer that has ever seen print. All the warning signs of troubled youth are presented clearly in a very engrossing manner. The work is tastefully done. The art, while cartoonish, sets a great mood for the story. The horrid excess of Jeff Dahmer's crimes are left unseen, as it should be. What is truly fascinating about people like Dahmer is not the gory details of their violence, but the psychology that unleashes such horrors. Derf really captures the essence of high school of that era. I was an early 80s student, myself, and little had changed by that point. I knew plenty of people much like the ones shown here. As a Dungeons & Dragons nerd, I too was near the bottom of the social ladder, much like Derf and Dahmer were. I can attest to the authenticity of Derf's portrayal of high school life of 30-odd years ago. As I read, I found myself wondering about the whereabouts of marginal characters I knew in my own school, like "Einerschteiner", "Squiddy" and the infamous "Onion". I'm just glad I haven't read about them in the newspapers. Derf himself had a ringside seat to the genesis of notorious serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer's psychosis as a teen in 1970s small town Ohio. Derf was the leader of a group of self-described "band nerds" who associated with Dahmer in a strange blend of hero worship, fascination, pity, and disgust. Derf and his friends based a whole quasi-mythology and much of their banter and social interactions on Dahmer's desperate and bizarre attempts to gain peer acceptance through sick humor. Dahmer seems to have deeply infiltrated almost every aspect of Derf and friends' high school life. One is reminded of Alfred Jarry's creation of his absurdist play, Ubu Roi, based on stories he and his school friends made up about their strange and eccentric physics teacher. Derf generally treats Dahmer as sympathetically as possible, noting how his disturbed behavior and alcoholism, while blatantly obvious to his peers, was overlooked by every single adult in Dahmer's life. Derf even shows how he and his friends egged Dahmer on to ever greater lengths of weirdness and unacceptable behavior, culminating in an unforgettable trip to a local mall where they paid Dahmer $35 to run amok for two hours. Ironically, this episode was the 'last straw' that resulted in their disassociation from him due to discomfort with his ever-worsening freakish persona. I cannot give this any less than five stars, however one area that I think Derf held back on was the central character of Dahmer. I'm not saying he should have showed his killings or grotesque fantasies, I just think Derf consciously or unconsciously tended to dehumanize Dahmer, rendering him more as a caricature of a lunatic than an actual human being. The scenes of Dahmer alone or with his parents do not have this problem, just the scenes of his interactions with others in his peer group. I do understand that Dahmer had this crazed persona he hid behind at school, but I am sure he was a little more articulate than presented here, especially with the members of Derf's "Dahmer Fan Club". Clues in the end notes to Derf's book reinforce this, as well as the articulate nature of the interviews with Dahmer that I have seen in documentaries. In the book, Dahmer's dialogue is mainly restricted to loud exclamations of "THMAAAA!" and "BAAAAA!". (This is a depiction of Dahmer's cruel mockery of a handicapped man who was employed by his mother.) However, in an actual 70s high school year book cartoon done by Derf and included in the text, many quoted "Dahmerisms" are included that prove that Dahmer was in fact possessed of an eccentric and somewhat obscure sense of humor, rather than being a non-stop bellowing lunatic. Unfortunately Derf only allows Dahmer to act as a real human in a couple of scenes; notably, one where he manages to maneuver himself and several classmates into a meeting with Vice President Mondale during a trip to Washington DC. Understandably, Derf must have wanted to distance himself from Dahmer as much as possible in the making of this book. He had the unenviable task of telling the story of his boyhood friendship with one of the most horrible serial killers of modern times while at the same time avoiding being tarred with the same brush, so to speak. Derf constantly throws in little anecdotes to emphasize the normalcy of his own life as he recounts the bizarreness of Dahmer's. Perhaps Derf was reluctant to show himself and his friends interacting with Dahmer on any level deeper than a "bemused observer" capacity. Certainly, Dahmer was a real weirdo, but it would have been fascinating if Derf had added one or two scenes where Dahmer actually interacted a little with his peers. Undoubtedly there must have been incidents like that, as I doubt someone of Derf's imagination and intellect would have been so thoroughly captivated by a guy whose sole schtick was a loud, ugly impression of a cerebral palsy sufferer. All in all, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It would have been interesting to see at least one or two of Dahmer's more lucid interactions with classmates, and to find out a bit about how he functioned academically (I understand his IQ was about 145), but these are very small complaints indeed given the general exceptional quality of this book. We may still not know the whole explanation behind the descent into horrific madness of an intelligent, pleasant looking boy with a well-to-do family and a caring father, but Derf's graphic novel does as much or more to explain it as any of the other literature on this all-around tragic subject. Five Stars.

So once upon a time, there was this guy named Jeffrey Dahmer. You might’ve heard of him. In 1991, he got caught trying to abduct a guy in Milwaukee, and police found a human head in his refrigerator, along with human remains stored in barrels and various severed body parts scattered around his apartment. He’s one of the most notorious serial killers in history. Back in ’91, there was an editorial cartoonist called Derf Backderf working for a paper in Cleveland. His wife, also a reporter at the paper, calls him, tells him about this serial killer they’ve arrested in Milwaukee, and drops a bomb on him — Backderf graduated from high school with the guy. So Backderf spends a few years wrestling with the fact that he was friends with a future serial killer and eventually sits down, does a ton of research, and creates this graphic novel, “My Friend Dahmer,” a retelling of his interactions as a teenager with this kid who everyone laughed at and no one really understood. Backderf and his circle of friends discovered Dahmer after he’d started impersonating a person with cerebral palsy and throwing fake epileptic fits to get attention. Dahmer was a stone freak, but his antics were amusing in the juvenile way we all enjoy when we’re in high school, and they encouraged him as much as they could, even calling themselves the “Dahmer Fan Club.” Backderf remembers him as a really strange kid, sometimes disturbing, usually harmless, often depressing. He drank heavily in high school — a fact that a number of students were aware of, but that every teacher apparently missed — hiding beer and hard liquor around the school grounds so he’d always be able to sneak out and find something to drink. Ultimately, it’s a really sympathetic portrait of Dahmer. Not to say that it’s entirely Dahmer-positive — Backderf says more than once that Dahmer is a kid he feels tremendous sympathy and empathy for — but that goes away when he crosses the line into murder. But Backderf knew Dahmer as a sad, strange kid with parents struggling through mental health issues and a very nasty divorce. Dahmer wanted attention, like a lot of kids, he was darkly funny, like a lot of kids, and he was conflicted when he realized he was gay, like a lot of kids. Of course, not a lot of kids also realize they’re necrophiliacs and have to struggle with urges to do violence to others. But even then, Backderf recognizes that Dahmer went through a very stressful high school career and kept himself together — admittedly with huge doses of alcohol — until after graduation. Backderf says that he thinks Jeff Dahmer, the disturbed teenager, could have been saved if only the adults in his life had paid closer attention to him and cared enough to get involved. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but that doesn’t do anything to make this book any less fascinating. This is a pretty thick book, and I burned through it as fast as I could, including the section detailing Backderf’s research and notes. Backderf’s writing about Dahmer is captivating and humanizing in all the best ways — this isn’t something that glorifies a serial killer, but instead asks us to look at how the serial killer was created, at Dahmer’s depressingly rotten youth, at all the ways this kid was failed by the grownups who were supposed to be helping him. The setting is also pretty amazing — Revere High School in West Allis, Ohio in the mid- to late-1970s is a great backdrop for all of this to happen. Locked-down schools, zero tolerance, and No Child Left Behind were 20-30 years in the future, and the book is both stereotypically ’70s-ish and simultaneously timeless — we’ve all felt this way about school, we’ve all been freaked out by our adolescent hormones, we’ve all wondered whether we’d survive to get out of school and wondered what happened to the people we used to hang with. This isn’t a horror story, at least not in the traditional sense. If you read it hoping for blood and gore and psycho killer mayhem, you’re going to be very disappointed. If we can call it horror at all, it’s more a matter of the horror of how one person can go from being a pretty normal kid to the kind of lunatic who’d kill 17 people. It’s a heck of a good story, and I think you should read it.

This is the personal tale of how a kid who was weird throughout his teens was ignored by all the adults around him until he developed into the infamous sexually assaulting murderer who ate his victims and dissolved them in acid. We read (and see) stories here of hallway conversations, prom dates, high school clubs and drinking. The author approaches it from the perfect distance--never losing sight of Dahmer's crimes while at the same time showing him as a real human being. In hindsight, we wonder why the teens (who knew he did strange things to animal and drank himself into oblivion almost daily) had no one to tell about Jeff, no one who seemed to care. We also wonder why he was overlooked in high school and allowed to come into the school drunk on a daily basis. THe author keeps reminding us--he was the SECOND weirdest kid in the school. In other words, being weird in high school does not necessarily correlate with becoming a criminal later. THe story is animated with terrific drawings. This is just about a perfect specimen of a graphic novel. I didn't give it 5 stars just because I could not be seen as saying "love it" about a book which touches evil so closely.

Interesting book. Lots of comic book style artwork. Definitely a must have for true crime junkies.

An excellent read and well illustrated. You learned more than what you learned in the movie adaptation. Most interesting was his source material a great read!

I remember reading a page on the net several years ago, which was a cartoon detailing a fishing trip with Jeffrey Dahmer and a friend when they were teenagers. On this trip, young Jeff caught a sunfish and, instead of throwing it back as his friend asked, he proceeded to chop it to death with a pocket knife. I have always remembered this, but have never found the page again. Just this past Sunday I found out it was part of an actual book called My Friend Dahmer, written by Derf Backderf. So I checked out the Amazon Look Inside bits, and was interested enough to get a copy. It arrived Monday, and I've been through it twice since then. It's not so much the drawing style, which is basically R Crumb, but the haunting story it tells of Dahmer before he became a serial killer, when he was a child and something might have been done for him, if the adults around him had only looked up from their own self-absorption and seen there was something terribly terribly wrong. Backderf makes no bones about his sympathy (pity, really) for Dahmer ending when Dahmer committed his first murder; however, he also draws an unflinching picture of Dahmer's loneliness, his isolation from others and from his family, and his (Backderf's) own participation in making Dahmer feel less than human. I'm a contemporary of the kids depicted in this book -- I graduated high school in 1975, they graduated in 1978. I was an outcast, and was bullied about as badly as Dahmer. I was pretty much ignored by my parents and the teachers. But why didn't I become a serial killer? Why am I reasonably well adjusted, and have been a contributing member of society for lo, these 40 some odd years since graduation? What makes one person become an average wife/mom/worker bee, and one person the worst serial killer in recent history? I think those are all questions that keep me turning back to this book, and that make me recommend it to all y'all out there. There are no graphic depictions of murder, death or gore -- a couple of illustrations of roadkill and one incident which shows that Dahmer, even in his descent into madness, still retained a core of humanity and kindness many "normal" people don't have. At least until he finally crossed the line and became a murderer. Well worth the money, well worth the read.

This graphic novel certainly took me on an emotional roller coaster, which wasn't terribly shocking considering the fact that Dahmer himself and the events of his life take you on one as well. Parts of it were just riveting, others oppressively sad. Some things I liked, others not so much, particularly the parts that actually had very little to do with Dahmer. Despite its flaws, I planned on giving this a better review, but unfortunately something at the very end of the book kept me from doing so, and while the majority of my issues is with Backderf's perspective and opinions on JD as a person and not with the book itself, for me, his opinions tainted his storytelling and ought to have been omitted. I'll start with the positives, as there are some. It's well written and a decent length. The artwork isn't the best ever but for this story it works, particularly in the drawings of Dahmer alone driving and drinking, in the woods, and in his room. The loneliness and depression that plagued Jeff his entire life was almost insidious in nature, as if something sinister latched onto him and exploited his weaknesses, and somehow Backderf really succeeds in capturing this visually in those specific moments of the book, and has a much stronger and more lasting impact than much of the written dialogue, some of which seemed pretty irrelevant to me. It only makes sense that Backderf includes some of his own individual experiences growing up, but I sort of felt they just weren't necessary. Perhaps he wanted to emphasize the stark contrast between his young life and Dahmer's, but those parts were of least interest to me. It should certainly be noted that Backderf is EXTREMELY bold for referring to himself as Dahmer's friend, which he states frequently. He refers to some of the other oddball social outcasts as Jeffrey's "friends", which I felt was almost implying that Backderf considered himself a better friend to Jeff than them. If his and his friends' treatment of JD constitutes friendship, then I have never had any friends and nor would I want any. Some of the writing comes off as a bit pretentious and made me wonder if Backderf was merely exploiting the fact that he knew Jeff for his own personal gain, but much of that I would've been willing to overlook. My problem lies toward the end of the book, in 20 pages of sources and information on Dahmer's life. Some of this seemed kind of bizarre to me anyway, that he would include something like this. But all of it was fine until he decides to include some of his own personal views on Dahmer, with him specifically stating that "...the only tragedy is that Dahmer didn't have the courage to put a gun to his head and end it". The coldness of such a statement is just incredible. I lost a friend to suicide several years ago, and when something as devastating as suicide leaves some kind of stamp on your life, words like Backderf's really sting. I don't care who someone is, what crimes they've committed, and how grotesque and ghastly their crimes may be (and in this case they certainly were) - saying that about anyone is WRONG. Putting a gun to your head is neither courageous nor is it cowardly, it is what it is and it's terrible, and no one should die that way. Most people would probably say this is such an inconsequential part of the book, but I couldn't help but be bothered by it and it shouldn't have been included anyway. It's good for a one-time read, and it'll have this surreal effect on you after you read it that just kind of lingers for a while. Some of it was very strange for me because I was raised in Akron and the places Backderf included were all too familiar to me - Summit Mall, the old Polsky's department store (the one downtown is now part of the university), and the house itself has an unsettling heaviness when you drive past it. Overall it's a great graphic novel that's worth reading. If you're like me and you're more interested in the psychology of Dahmer and Jeff as a person, I'd highly recommend The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters.

I have been interested in getting my hands on the original form of storytelling of Dahmer's early days ever since watching the movie based on similar account. Apparently it comes from the perspective of Dahmer's former classmate ; Derf Backderf who is also the author himself. The comic book has given a rare insight into Dahmer's background, especially in his high school days. I have watched enough crime shows and documentaries to assume that Dahmer must have come from a broken and dysfunctional family. True enough, his estranged parents are what cause him to become so deprived of love and attention that he seek for another outlet (his sick hobbies of taking home roadkills for him to experiment on) to feel accepted. He is also a loner at school and Derf happens to be one of the rare few to interact with him at school. Though I never really like Backderf's character as he seems like he's using Dahmer a lot for his own entertainment. All in all, I couldn't get this book in my country Malaysia so I have to look it up on Amazon. I've received the book in exactly a week with no damage at all. Highly recommended to those who have been following Dahmer's case closely.

Es muy interesante y al mismo tiempo escalofriante el saber la historia de alguien que creció al lado de un asesino como Dahmer. La calidad de los dibujos es excelsa se aprecia el talento del artista desde la primera página.

Powerful drawings that set the atmosphere from the start. The author walks a very fine line: it is the story of a serial killer, seen and written by his high-school friend who could not have known at the time.

Good art work from a person who grew up with the man, providing another point of view on such a disturbing topic.

This was a quality book. The artwork is really good and the storyline is good. I meant to read this over a couple of days and ended up reading it all in one night it's very addictive.

Un "comic book" pas si comique que ça si j'ose dire ! Très belle enquête journalistique, la photo de classe originale biffée et les dessins de l'époque réalisés par l'auteur ajoutent une touche de réalisme qui rend l'ensemble très vivant et angoissant à la fois. The scary thing about it is maybe the egotistic nature of our "modern" society as a whole that is so well depicted here : NO ONE even tried to help ! nor his parents, nor the academic institution, nor his "friends" who just used him to goof around until they threw him off without any kind of personal interest or compassion... Thus the introspective look back of the author is definitely compelling !