
Ok, not exactly fresh news but I just read this really cool comic book about Jeffrey Dahmer’s youth called “My Friend Dahmer” by Derf Backderf. Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial-killer who loved, killed, mutilated and ate (in no specific order) a bunch of cool looking young guys back in the eighties with this cute particularity of storing body parts for months for his own entertainment. Of course, these killings didn’t come out of the blue, one could even point out it was the long coming consequence of a compulsive fascination for roadkill, animals entrails (“I wanted to say what it looked like” said Dahmer), death and all sorts of putrid things that inevitably led him to social awkwardness, sexual frustration, alcoholism and, finally, kill a whole lot of people. Thank God, he wasn’t a Black Sabbath fan…
“My Friend Dahmer” tells you all about the upbringing of young Dahmer, upbringing which took place in some small town of the Midwest and a rather, o surprise, shitty family environment. Not exactly the right time and place to get oneself out of the closet to say the least. And so inevitably, we see lonely Dahmer slowly but surely turned into the serial-killer he was bound to become. The big turn-on about this piece of work, and what makes it so unique, is the fact that it was actually drawn and written by someone who spent junior high and high school with Dahmer! What you got here is a recollection of Dahmer memories from a young kid throughout his teenage years.
Empathy but not sympathy, it’s what the author is giving us, far from any CNN sensationalism crap and typical villain portraiture, not to mention the goofy graphic style contrasting drastically with the horror of the subject dissected here with the outmost accuracy (Derf also dug up a lot of archive material).
Hard to say if Dahmer’s life would have been different if the people around him, starting from his parents, would have paid more attention to him. My humble take on this is that the guy could have maybe found salvation if he only he had the capability of turning his shit into art. Be it gay porn or taxidermy or porn taxidermy or Nicolas Cage.
(Mais bon sans ca c’est vrai qu’on aurait jamais eu droit a un tel joyau il faut bien l’avouer…)
At least this comic book will give you another vision of one of the biggest figure from the golden age of serial-killers, when they were wearing brown suits, big glasses, driving dodgy vans while Donna Summer was playing on the radio and DNA wasn’t yet their worst nightmare.
“My Friend Dahmer” conception started soon after Jeffrey’s death and its first incarnation got turned down by all publishers circa 1994. Derf decided to auto-published a shorter version that instantly gained a cult status in the underground in 2002 (and even got adapted as a stage play), it eventually got published to international acclaim in its…
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