My Friend Dahmer

We all have that one friend from school—the strange kid, the class freak, the guy whose antics amused, entertained, and maybe even alarmed us. The one who sticks in our heads even with the passing of the years. That classmate is invariably left behind when we graduate, vanishing into memory, filed away with our old yearbooks and other teenage mementos. But every now and then we wonder, whatever happened to that friend ? For one man who grew up in a small town in Ohio, that question was answered by every media outlet in the world on July 22, 1991, when Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested for the murder of seventeen young men and teenage boys.

My Friend Dahmer is a haunting, original graphic novel by Derf Backderf, an award-winning political cartoonist and comix creator. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of the future serial killer with whom he shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling helplessly against the ghastly urges bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche.
The Dahmer recounted here, universally regarded as an inhuman monster by the rest of the world, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid sucked inexorably into madness while the adults in his life fail to notice. In My Friend Dahmer, Backderf comes as close as anyone has to explaining the seemingly unexplainable phenomenon of one Jeffrey Dahmer, Revere High School class of 1978.