My Friend Dahmer is the hauntingly original graphic novel by Derf Backderf, the award winning political cartoonist. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of Jeffery Dahmer, the future serial killer with whom he shared classrooms, hallways, libraries and car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young man struggling helplessly against the urges, some ghastly, bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche. The Dahmer recounted here, although universally regarded as an inhumane monster, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid sucked inexorably into madness while the adults in his life fail him. The crimes Dahmer committed are incredibly depraved, infamous and unforgettable, but in My Friend Dahmer Backderf provides profound (and at times, even strangely comic) insight into how, and more important, why Jeffery Dahmer transformed from a high school nerd into the most depraved serial killer since Jack the Ripper, coming as close as anyone yet has to explaining the seemingly unexplainable phenomenon of Jeffery Dahmer.

作者简介

Derf Backderf has been nominated for two Eisner Awards and has received a host of honors, including the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning. His weekly comic strip, The City, has appeared in more than 100 newspapers over the past 22 years. Backderf lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

精彩书评

VOYA As a junior high kid, he collected roadkill and stored it in acid in a shed on the back of his parents' property. He was beneath the notice of all but the bullies. His mother suffered from peculiar neurotic episodes, and eventually his parents divorced. He realized that he was homosexual but never acted on it. He attracted a little more attention in high school, due greatly to the eccentric persona he adapted to thwart adults and humor his peers. He tried to drown his fantasies (which included sexual fulfillment with dead bodies) in alcohol. It is really little wonder that Jeffrey Dahmer went on to become the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper. This reviewer was prepared to hate this graphic novel but is thrilled to be proven wrong. What could have been an exploitative tell-all is instead a sympathetic portrayal of Dahmer's descent into madness. Backderf is a two-time nominee for Eisner Awards, but most do not know that he spent his junior and senior high years as a classmate and acquaintance of Dahmer. Thoughtfully reflecting on the influential school years, Backderf uses a variety of sources—FBI interviews, news stories, Dateline NBC, his own experiences—to chronicle a young man's battle with his own inner demons. Black, white, and ocher panels portray a somber story that needs to be told, if only to warn us all of the dangers of living on the fringe. Reviewer: Rebecca Moore Kirkus Reviews A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story. If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn't try to elicit sympathy for "Jeff." Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone--maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence--should have done something. "To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room," writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer's behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents' troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother's decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. "It's my belief that Dahmer didn't have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn't have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn't been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent," writes Backderf. "Once Dahmer kills, however--and I can't stress this enough--my sympathy for him ends." An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.