I grew up on Derf Backderf's political cartoons. His long running comic The City ran in alternative and local newspapers around the United States from 1990-2024 along with Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World and Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man. So when I spotted a Derf Backderf graphic novel at the comic shop about his high school friendship with Jefferey Dahmer, the brutal serial killer? I immediately knew I needed it.
The artist and writer, Derf Backderf, attended the same small town school in Ohio as Dahmer. He never really got to know Dahmer until high school, and was never close friends with him, but Dahmer never really had any close friends, so Backderf's experiences are as close as we get outside of his family. Unsurprisingly, the image we get is of a profoundly tortured soul. A little more surprisingly, the image we get is of the kind of weird kid that everyone knows, who makes weird noises, does annoying stuff for attention, and doesn't really care about school.
Backderf doesn't try to demonize or excuse Dahmer. He pities him, and does his best to understand how Dahmer fell into the emotional pit that led him to murder 17 young men, but he holds Dahmer responsible as well. Dahmer's mental illness can't be said to have been severe enough that he lacked a grasp on reality, or failed to understand the wrongness of his actions. Backderf also strives for accuracy in his depiction of Dahmer. Backderf is very clear in the end material about what parts of the book came from his memory, what part came from interviews with others who know him, and what parts he researched.
Modern society has a certain way of demonizing but also enshrining serial killers that makes them seem terrifying and inhuman to the exclusion of all else. And while they can be both of those things, the public discourse about them tends to fail to address that no matter how out of touch with humanity they become, they all start off as human. My Friend Dahmer gives an astonishingly honest look at its subject.
It should be noted that this isn't a book about the actual murders- it's about Dahmer's youth, his friendship with Backderf, and what led Dahmer to become the serial killer that was so widely reviled. This graphic novel is still a worthwhile read for people interested in serial killers, but it's also quite accessible to a more general public. I highly recommend this one.
(There's also a move adaptation of My Friend Dahmer, but I haven't seen it.)