My Friend Dahmer is a single issue comic written and illustrated by Derf (John Backderf). In it, Derf recounts his middle and high school years as a friend of Jeffrey Dahmer. Yes, THAT Jeffrey Dahmer. Heavy subject matter. I’m taking a look at this now, because Derf is currently working on expanding and reworking the 26 page comic into a full length (150 pages?) graphic novel. He says there is a lot more to tell from that time, and I believe him. How can there not be? Everything that Jeffrey Dahmer did in those early days of his life have a terrifying relevance now. I’m very curious to see that book when it is done, but for today, I’ll look at this single issue.
The book opens with an introduction from the writer, answering the question Why? His answer is simply,
Because I’m a storyteller, and I have a story to tell.
Derf goes on to say that he intentionally toned down his stylized and exaggerated art so as not to make the story seem less believable. His art is some odd marriage of Peter Bagge and Charles Burns. He uses heavy blacks like Burns to show Dahmer frequently in shadow, his features obscured. There is very little violence in this book. It’s all implied, and the sense of doom that knowing the whole story gives is palpable. The Jeffrey Dahmer presented in this book, is a lonely, damaged person. Drunk before class started every day, and so weird that even the bullies left him alone. While never excusing any of the crimes he committed, Derf paints the picture of a young man who slipped through his entire high school life invisible and ignored. Hindsight being what it is, it’s easy to point fingers and say that someone should have noticed, but as Derf himself points out,
It was the seventies. Long before just say no and all that shit. Substance abuse – that phrase didn’t even exist yet – was regarded as fun not as a problem or an addiction. Besides, you couldn’t narc on a pal…it simply wasn’t done!
Derf doesn’t whitewash his own actions in the story either. When Dahmer starts impersonating his mother’s interior decorator who has cerebral palsy, Derf and his friends encourage him. They take him to the mall and pay him to fake fits in front of crowds. Derf makes the point that even when they were hanging out with him; it was more that Dahmer was a mascot, or entertainment for the day and not actually a friend. Like everyone else in his life, Derf and his friends were too busy and absorbed in their own lives to bother with Jeffrey. In a particularly uncomfortable scene, we jump forward 10 years, with Derf and his pals joking about how no one has seen Dahmer in all that time, and how he was probably a serial killer now. Awkward.
Derf doesn’t believe that any of his friends were ever in danger, but after his crimes were exposed they started to piece together a timeline. While doing so, they discover that the last time that any of them had seen him; he had already killed his first victim and may have had the body within feet of where they were standing. That’s…unsettling. The whole book is unsettling, and more than a little tragic. A really great read. Check this one out.