The tone is sympathetic and enraged (“Where were the damn adults?”) while not excusing or making the story unduly fascinating. The final panel in John 'Derf' Backderfs chilling graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer, is a haunting portrait of the author after getting a call from his wife, a reporter in Akron, Ohio. He slices up roadkill to see what it looks like, gets attention in school by doing imitations of cerebral palsy victims, and swims in alcohol to drown out his violent urges. It’s a barbed-wire portrait of a devil-minded teen with divorcing and neglectful parents. During the 1970s in Ohio, he attended high school with and befriended Jeffrey Dahmer, “the loneliest kid I’d ever met.” Backderf and his social misfit crew drift in and out of Dahmer’s story, which the author pieced together from memories and more recent research. ‘My Friend Dahmer’ by Derf Backderf Author: Cathy Camper ApAt a writer’s pitch recently, a literary agent cautioned that the market for memoirs had become flooded, and publishers were only interested in gripping, unique stories. Instead of the City’s surreal, satirical ennui, Backderf explores a hard-to-believe autobiographical story. Readers of Derf Backderf’s the City strip in various alt-weeklies will immediately recognize his visual style (flattened landscapes and blocky characters who look uncomfortable in their own skin), but not the content in this visceral, ambitious new graphic novel.
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