My Friend Dahmer: Derf Backderf (Graphic Biographies)

Product Information

And Dahmer's parents? They were basically indifferent, caught up in their own brand of marital warfare. His mother may have suffered from some mental problems. It's about deconstructing darkness and tracing the origins of destructive personalities. Dahmer as a teen wasn't so different from kids we all knew in high school. As a youth services librarian, I read a lot of books for and about teens. And a lot of them (perhaps especially the ones I gravitate to) are about outsiders. Dahmer could have been just another outsider kid - one with a messed up family, one with repressed sexuality, one who made jokes out of things that are not funny. Exploring his history helps me to think about how I can influence teens for the good. About how I can influence humanity for the good. And how close we all are to the darkness. To letting our own destructive tendancies to go too far.

My Friend Dahmer Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary My Friend Dahmer Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

a b c d e f g Arrant, Chris (May 8, 2012). "Derf Opens Up About His High School Friend Jeffrey Dahmer in New Graphic Novel". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved August 5, 2022.In 2012, Publishers Weekly named My Friend Dahmer in their list of the year's top five comics; [16] Lev Grossman, book critic for Time, named it one of his top five nonfiction books of the year; [7] and The A.V. Club named it the year's best nonfiction book. [17] Awards for My Friend Dahmer Year Yorio, Kara. "As Banned Books Week Approaches, the Fight Against Censorship Intensifies". School Library Journal . Retrieved 2022-08-05. Although the author mentions he researched the case of Dahmer, this book focuses on Dahmer's teenage years in high school. I'll explain why I felt like the author tried to milk knowing Dahmer and writing a book about his "friendship" with him. This is only my impression, and I may be way off base. Team Pet: Dahmer's fan club regard him more as a mascot than anything else; they hang out with him because they find him hilarious, but he's just too creepy to consider an actual friend. Subverted in regards to Lloyd Figg, whom Jeff is compared to. Lloyd appears blatantly Ax-Crazy next to the more quiet and awkward Jeff... but Jeff is the one that became a Serial Killer.

My Friend Dahmer (2002) by Derf Backderf | Goodreads

Derf's comic, later expanded into a much longer graphic novel released in 2012, chronicles the years he spent together with Dahmer in high school, unknowingly witnessing his friend's transformation into one of the most infamous serial killers in modern history. Along the way, Derf asks pertinent questions about why nobody – especially the adults– ever saw the warning signs of what Dahmer was becoming.Derf's not even that much of a douche. Kinda flawed in the self-reflection department (a glaring weakness in this memoir, and dammit memoirs need genius level self-reflections to be readable), but one of those nice, ambitious boys who got out of midwest suburbia to work in creative fields. Still, reading his book just made me kinda angry. Like, didn't he learn anything? Everything in this book is emotionally defensive. Like... okay Derf, you knew Dahmer? Do you feel regret over not treating him as kindly as you could have? Do you feel scared knowing that someone capable of doing such things was a relatively normal-seeming human being standing right next to you? Do you feel fooled? Derf spends like one second on uncomfortable, unflattering questions and then, snap! blames the "adults" and moves on. It seems like the most emotion he can display here is disgust. So that's this book. Disgust and tired armchair psychiatry. I guess what I mean is Derf should have explored his own emotions and actions instead of trying to figure out Dahmer's, which was obviously something out of his psychiatric and empathic league.