‘My friend Dahmer’: the comic and the movie you should know if you liked the Netflix series

Borderline personality disorder, schizotypal disorder, and psychosis: all these diseases were diagnosed Jeffrey Dahmer after his arrest in 1991. Legal expert reports aside, it did not take a genius to know that something was wrong in that head: as the series reminds us Dahrmer, the call ‘Milwaukee Butcher’ he had left behind a trail of 17 corpses, most of them young homosexuals, without the police lifting a finger to stop him.

However, although we are tempted to invoke the stereotype of the serial killer as an individual of diabolical intelligence, capable of going unnoticed while committing the greatest atrocities, this is far from reality, and even more so in this case. During his lifetime, Dahmer did not fit at all with the helpful image of the friendly guy who always said hello on the stairs.

From very early on, the future protagonist of so many morbid chronicles (and of various films equally interested in blood and livers) manifested many of the symptoms associated with severe mental disorders. Among them, unpredictable behavior, drug dependence (in his case, early alcoholism) and lack of social skills. So that, How is it that no one wanted or knew how to act in time?

Given the place that Dahmer occupies in the collective imagination of the United States, speculation has abounded on this matter. However, beyond the conjectures, we have a questionable, but incredibly sad testimony about the maturation of a future serial killer. We talk about My friend Dahmer, the comic published by the cartoonist John ‘Derf’ Backderf in 2012.

Although, at first glance, this work may seem destined to take advantage of the morbidity of the case, there are several reasons to approach it. The first: that Blackderf was not an opportunist, but an artist whose cartoons were already published in the Village Voice and other widely circulated media when the comic hit stores. The second: that the author and Jeffrey Dahmer were high school classmates. And, although Backderf exaggerated when referring to him as “friend”, it is true that the two had a fairly close relationship.

The weird guy from school

We say that Backderf (who published a first version of his work in 2002) exaggerated when calling Jeffrey Dahmer “friend” because, reading his comic, it is clear that his relationship with the future murderer was rather low intensity bullying the kind reserved for the weird kid in the neighborhood.

With a sickly shyness, a lanky physique, and truculent hobbies (he was fond of preserving animal carcasses in formaldehyde, storing the remains in a shed), young Dahmer was not exactly the most popular person in the world. Revere Institute of Richfield, Ohio. And, if both the author of the comic and his colleagues alternated with him, it was to relieve boredom by having a few laughs at his expense.

In fact, one of the most pathetic aspects of my friend dahmer It is his way of showing how these years putting up with jokes better or worse intentioned and putting on antics in the corridors of the institute to attract attention were the closest thing to a stage of normality in the life of the ‘Butcher’. Stage that was soon cut short by the discovery of alcohol as a means to silence impulses that he did not know how to control.

Vignettes from the comic ‘My friend Dahmer’.
John Backderf

Likewise, the fact that Backderf and Dahmer were neighbors gives the former insight into their family life not based solely on biographies, clinical studies, or court statements. For example, the cartoonist remembers the environment where both spent their youth, marked by the slow decline of the rubber industry in Ohio, and also to the parents of his object of study: a chemical engineer who never showed affection for his family and a teletype operator with her own string of mental and health problems. slopes.

In this way, the marriage of Dahmer’s parents appears to us as a slow process of decomposition, in which their eldest son was caught. (David Dahrmer, little brother of the murderer, does not appear in the comic, since the author hardly had any contact with him) and that included severe episodes of abandonment by both parents.

In 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer was an 18-year-old alcoholic who was facing his last year of high school from absenteeism to loneliness: both his father and mother had left the family home during a very turbulent divorce. Likewise, his high school ‘friends’ avoided him, since his behavior was already more disturbing than amusing. That same year, three months after graduating, Dahmer committed his first murder: that of a 19-year-old named Steve Hicks.

Vignettes from the comic 'My friend Dahmer'.
Vignettes from the comic ‘My friend Dahmer’.
John Backderf

During its last chapters, on the other hand, the comic also addresses one of the aspects of the protagonist that occupies the most space in the Ryan Murphy series: his sexuality. Like so many gay teenagers, then and now, Dahmer had to confront a context in which attraction to other men was unspeakable, if not monstrous.

Added to his disorders, Backderf points out, this perception of himself as an abnormal creature could have influenced the gestation of his homicidal impulses and his necrophilia. like the scotch Dennis Andrew Nielsen, another serial killer with much the same demeanor, Dahmer believed that keeping the bodies of his victims with him was the closest thing to romance he could ever have.

“Where were the adults?”

Here, except for a somewhat hypocritical epilogue, is where the story of My friend Dahmer. Upon its arrival in stores, the comic received a number of awards (including one from the highly prestigious Angouleme Festival), and was also adapted to the cinema in a homonymous film (Marc Mayers, 2017) with ross lynch (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) as the future murderer and alex wolff (Jumanji) like young John Backderf.

to this movie It deserves the honor of being the best-reviewed audiovisual product inspired by Dahmer’s life, a separate series. So what sensationalizing the story is allowed hinting that Backderf was about to become the killer’s first victim. A detail that the author of the comic had the decency not to include in his story.

Returning to the vignettes, let us emphasize that my friend dahmer it’s an uncomfortable read. Not only because of its theme, which brings them, but also because of what one might think of a narrator who, together with his friends, he spent his adolescence regarding one of the most notorious murderers in US history as his personal buffoon.

Still, the comic shows some empathy towards his object of study, without excusing his cruelties. And it is also a good recipe book to create a first world monster: a gray environment whose decadence no one seems to be aware of, a broken family where affection is conspicuous by its absence, the usual caste system in secondary schools and, as icing on the cake, large doses of homophobia. Add to this the aforementioned mental problems, and the result will not be pretty.

But above all, Backderf’s comic poses the question that more than one should ask when a guy like Jeffrey Dahmer makes headlines: “Where were the damn adults?”

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We would like to thank the author of this write-up for this outstanding material

‘My friend Dahmer’: the comic and the movie you should know if you liked the Netflix series