The Killer In Me Is The Killer In You: My Friend Dahmer Review

When I was 20, my college buddies and I brought our mutual friend Alf – a weirdly hairless mesomorph who was the son of a Federal court judge and therefore utterly naive and fearless when it came to the concept of consequences – to our local mall for a little fun. The act was this: Alf put his hood up, hunched his shoulders over and constantly licked his lips. Jim’s job was to hold Alf’s hand while they wandered about, and Alf would wander up to strangers and shout things like, “SAB-A-TOOO! DERRRR!” Then Jim would tug Alf away and apologize along the lines of, “Sorry about my retarded brother. Mom dropped him on his head. Last week.” Repeat until bored or an of-age friend got off work to buy beer for us.

So it was a little surprising to see almost this exact scene in a graphic novel. Except instead of Jim, it was a dude named Derf. And instead of Alf, it was Jeffrey Dahmer.

Obviously, we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives tend toward superhero comics; when it comes to the more autobiographical comics, it’s generally Amanda’s turf if it happens at all. But a long-time fascination with serial killers led me to pick up Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer yesterday, and it is not what I expected. This book is the antithesis of an adolescent power fantasy; a memoir from a guy who went to school with Dahmer before Dahmer killed anyone. And it’s a story about a broken high school kid who trades on being funny for friendship while he’s slowly disintegrating inside.

This might sound boring, but that’s what makes it fucking fascinating. This is a crucible in which a monster was being born… and it is a crucible that anyone who went to high school before Zero Tolerance and metal detectors and drug tests and random locker searches will recognize… and personally, as a guy who came up through school as a class clown, I recognized Dahmer… and it was chilling.

People picking up this book looking for lurid crime comics are going to be disappointed. But what is does deliver is a portrait of high school that is immediately recognizable: the driving around, looking for stuff to do. The impromptu parties. The internal, catchphrase-based language of high school cliques that differs only in the references. The desperation to, on one hand, grow up and move on to something else, while simultaneously desperate for it not to end because you have no idea what comes next… with that in particular writ large here because when it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer, you know what comes next after high school – the same day the author leaves town to go to college, Dahmer kills his first victim.

And the story works because it is so relatable… including the rampant alcohol abuse Dahmer induled in at school, which Backderf speculates was to dull the pain of Dahmer’s growing perverse urges. Sure, it’s hard to believe now that anyone could get through school utterly shitfaced on a day-to-day basis and that no one, teacher or classmate, would get involved in it. But school was very different 20 or 30 years ago. I knew a girl who, my freshman year, would come into history class on a daily basis just buzzing on mescaline. I knew this because she told me. I did nothing to intervene because not only was it none of my fucking business, but because I was fourteen, which means that I was more concerned about figuring out a way to convince her to let me touch her breasts. It’s a weird, hard world – high school worse than a lot of it – and we all get through it the best we can. And if a teacher caught a kid wrecked in the halls, so what? What’re they gonna do, fire him? That kind of thing went on all the time in high school, even when I went more than ten years later. The point is that what Backderf is showing us is completely familiar… except for the fact that the primary focus would go on to be a killer.

Backderf’s art is not your standard comic book art, which is fine because this is not a standard comic book. This stuff is cartoony, and is meant to be – the man is a cartoonist. His stuff is simply-lined, in no way realistic, and is reminiscent of R. Crumb-style indie comics. But the way he draws Dahmer is compelling: huge, awkward and blank-faced, generally only showing emotion when doing his comedy spaz routine… and that emotion obviously being faked. Backderf makes Dahmer look like a comic strip robot, there but not-there, and when you pause in the story and remember that this character is Jeffry Dahmer, the effect is chilling. You will never see Backderf’s art in a Superman comics… but that’s okay, because a book like this is where it belongs.

My Friend Dahmer is not a comic book like any other you’ll find this week. In its DNA, it’s a story about high school, about someone who did their best to fit in despite struggling with a crippling, horrifying secret. And while Dahmer’s secret was more extreme than most, which of us didn’t feel like we were going through high school behind a mask of some kind? Be it sexual preference, drug abuse, social anxiety, or as simple as jerking off, we all put on our masks and went to high school… and by focusing on this, Backderf does something remarkable: he makes cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer relatable. Backderf describes the story as a tragedy, and it is… one that everyone older than 18 can understand. I highly recommend this book. Check out a preview first if you must, but then go buy it.

Because you will see something in it you recognize… and that will disturb you.