My Friend, the Cannibal

I recently attended the Small Press Expo, an annual Bethesda, Maryland showcase for independent comic book creators. After perusing thousands of comics -- everything from Chris Ware's remarkably grand Building Stories to the elegant work of Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine to handmade black and white zines stapled together -- I can announce my own winner for the most impressive book: My Friend Dahmer, by a great cartoonist named Derf Backderf.

I was not prepared for how completely I would by absorbed by My Friend Dahmer, which recounts author Backderf's high school friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer, who would become one of America's most nightmarish serial killers. This is a haunting book. Backderf -- henceforth referred to at Derf, because that's what everyone calls him and he calls himself -- is well known among readers of alternative weeklies, fifty of which publish his weekly strip "The City."

I have been reading "The City" for more than a decade, but "the City" did not prepare me for My Friend Dahmer. Derf first met Jeffrey Dahmer in seventh grade in Ohio, where both men grew up. Dahmer was "the loneliest kid I ever met," according to Derf. One of Derf and Dahmer's former classmates praised My Friend Dahmer for showing "the teenage years of an American monster."

But what truly terrified me down to my soul after finishing My Friend Dahmer is how Derf so convincingly portrays Dahmer as a deeply sick man who was all but screaming for help (actually, there were times when he seemed to be literally screaming for help). This is not to excuse what he did, or to lapse into psychobabble and victimology. But what Derf explores with such pathos is that Dahmer was desperate for help and couldn't get it.

From an early age Dahmer had a fascination with dissection and the insides of animals. The son of a chemist, he would find roadkill and dissolve the skin in acid. In high school he threw fake epileptic fits and for laughs imitated the gestures and speech of someone with cerebral palsy.

He also began drinking to control the compulsions he felt. Dahmer was homosexual, and had fantasies involving sex with men and murder. The alcohol numbed those -- for a while.

Derf was a witness to Dahmer's self-medicating, and one of the most chilling scenes in My Friend Dahmer occurs when Derf is driving Dahmer and two other guys to the local mall. They've paid Dahmer to pitch fake fits in public and generally cause trouble. In the 10-minute drive to the mall, Dahmer sat in the back seat and polished off an entire six-pack of beer.

It was at this point that Derf knew that something was wrong with Dahmer, even if the teachers and administrators at Revere High did not. Looking back from our era of zero tolerance in schools, it amazing to realize just how slack things were in America's public schools in the 1970s.

While Dahmer's parents were bickering at home, on their way to a divorce, Dahmer would stay at school long after hours, getting drunk outside the building. The teachers didn't notice -- in fact, one of them once bragged in class about his skill in rolling a joint. "Where were the adults?" Derf asks. Indeed.

When his cries for help didn't get noticed and his parents divorced, Dahmer spun out of control. He moved to Milwaukee, and eventually would murder 17 people. He would dismember his victims, have sex with them after they were dead, and put their body parts in acid.

Derf, who ends his story after Dahmer's first murder, tells the story with more subtlety than a novelist and certainly Hollywood would. My Friend Dahmer, like most of Derf's work, is black and white, and it masterfully uses shadow to convey the darkness that was slowly swallowing its lead character. I left the Small Press Expo with a stack of books and comics, but it was the one that I could not put down.