My Friend Dahmer

Everyone has a weird classmate whose antics entertained, amused, and perhaps scared us in school. The one we remember even after many years. After graduation, no one communicates with him; he dissolves in memory, stored along with old photo albums and artifacts of adolescence. But sometimes we ponder what happened to him. In the case of one man who grew up in a small town in Ohio, the world’s media answered that question all at once. This happened on July 22, 1991, when Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested for the murder of 17 young men and teenagers. «My Friend Dahmer» is an outstanding graphic novel by Derf Backderf, a recipient of awards for political comics. On these pages, Backderf tries to understand the future serial killer with whom he attended school, spent time during breaks, and drove around. He gives rise to a compassionate portrait of a deeply troubled young man who struggles against terrible desires surging from the dark corners of his soul. Dahmer is viewed worldwide as a monstrous inhuman being, but here he is depicted as a lonely weirdo – even too human. A shy guy who was irrevocably drawn into madness amid complete ignorance from adults. We all know what Dahmer did, but in «My Friend Dahmer», Backderf offers his unique persuasive, and sometimes even oddly comical, arguments about how and, more importantly, why Jeffrey Dahmer transformed from a school oddball into as terrible an enemy of mankind as Jack the Ripper. In «My Friend Dahmer», Backderf comes closer than anyone before him to unraveling the seemingly unexplainable case of Jeffrey Dahmer, a 1978 graduate of Revere High School.