My Friend Dahmer

My Friend Dahmer

Derf's collected Dahmer comics

As true crime books about serial killers go, the most numerous are those written by journalists who covered cases, with first hand accounts of former law-enforcement officials coming in second. After that you have a smattering of memoirs by family members. But among the truly rare, and most interesting, are books by friends who knew the perpetrators before they became killers. When done right, these books have both the qualities of good autobiographies, as well as offering rare glimpses at the psychology of killers-in-the-making. Ann Rule's excellent memoir The Stranger Beside Me is one such book. Derf Backderf's graphic novel My Friend Dahmer is another.

Derf was already a successful cartoonist whose work appeared in papers from New York City to Phoenix when his high school acquaintance Jeff Dahmer was arrested for murder and cannibalism. It's clear that Derf struggled for a long time with whether and how to tell his story. It wasn't until Dahmer's death in 1994 that Derf began to chronicle their acquaintance in cartoon form. It made it's way into print in 1997, collected form in 2002, but it wasn't until 2012 that it reached it's final fully fleshed out book length graphic novel form.

There's a reason Time magazine named it one of the top 5 non-fiction books of 2012. The story deals with a difficult subject in an interesting and respectful way. It never depicts any of the murders, just the years leading up to them.

But My Friend Dahmer is much more than a serial killer story. It's a document of the drudgery of high school life in 1970s Ohio, a time and place of such vacant isolationism that one wonders, not so much why it happened, but why it didn't happen more. Indeed when Derf finally learns that one of his friends was a serial killer, Dahmer isn't even the first possibility that came to mind.

***** out of *****