Hormone-Addled Teenager: Since this is Jeffrey Dahmer we're talking about, this manifests in very disturbing ways. 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. There are no excuses made for what Jeffrey Dahmer eventually became, just a sort of filling in the blanks of the timeline of his downward spiral into insanity . . . 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

My Friend Dahmer (2002) by Derf Backderf | Goodreads My Friend Dahmer (2002) by Derf Backderf | Goodreads

Villain with Good Publicity: Downplayed. Derf remembered Jeff as being someone who was "off". Still, his behavior was seen as mostly humorous by his classmates. First of all the title of this book is misleading. It’s not a comic about being close friend of Dahmer. Author was just a classmate, a person that saw meek, socially inept & quiet Dahmer in passing from hallways to his class. It’s not some close insight on how Dahmer would display himself in front of a person he would trust. So it promises something in a title that it doesn’t deliver. Well that’s a bummer. An Aesop: If someone shows signs of distress or mental illness, intervene as soon as possible or those problems will get worse. Attention Whore: What Lloyd Figg, with all his Ax-Crazy antics (though no doubt a troubled kid with serious issues 'upstairs') likely turned out to be. Class Clown: Jeff gets a following by pranking students and teachers with fake cerebral palsy behavior.

Comics

EDIT: I had to update the review to include that Jeff Dahmer was a serial killer, a friend of mine -

My Friend Dahmer: the comic as Bildungsroman: Journal of

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 is a nonfiction graphic novel about the author's time growing up as a junior high/high school classmate of the infamous serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. He explains how pitiable of a teen Dahmer was, and the home life that plagued him, as well as going into some of the mental health struggles the killer faced from a young age, such as his obsession with corpses and their insides, or his desperate fantasies of having relations with them. Irony: A lesson of sorts in not judging books by their covers; Lloyd Figg makes a big show of being a huge psycho edgelord while Jeff looks relatively normal and well-behaved (even Derf in the lunchroom lampshades ◊ this when Figg's having a meltdown) in comparison... but it is the latter who becomes a genuine Serial Killer. This material doesn’t form well-versed context to even try understand how strange person as Dahmer would feel as a student. Nothing revealing. I Hate Past Me: Derf doesn't hate his teenage self, per se, but he is terribly embarrassed by how ridiculously insensitive he and his friends could be.

My Friend Dahmer - Read Comic My Friend Dahmer - Read Comic

My memories of [Dahmer] are of the tormented kid spiraling into madness, not the monster who later committed those horrific crimes. I remember him as bullied and shunned, much as I was. A quiet young boy who devolved helplessly into a twisted soul." 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.Lloyd Figg, a crude, disruptive, kleptomaniacal student that Derf regards as the class psycho and someone even Jeff is offended by. He's even Derf's first guess when he hears that someone from his high school class is a serial killer. 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. Sometimes when reading non-fiction it feels like it is just an extended research paper. But, when the author was actually involved in the events, it gains a bit more of a personal investment. My Friend Dahmer is definitely the most intense first-hand non-fiction I have ever read. It's not just another exposé on a horrifying story, it is well fleshed out, truthful retelling of previously little known events from before the nightmare began. a b Soderberg, Brandon (2012-04-30). "My Friend Dahmer". The Comics Journal . Retrieved 2022-08-05.

My Friend Dahmer (Comic Book) - TV Tropes My Friend Dahmer (Comic Book) - TV Tropes

Lccn 2020285078 Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Cyrillic Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.4249 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1300373 Openlibrary_edition Narration: Some instinct warned me off. I was always wary of Dahmer. I was willing to hang out with him at school, but there was no way I was going to forge a closer friendship. The original self-published comic book was adapted and staged as a one-act play by the NYU Theater Department.Aside from missing this opportunity in his book, it is a fascinating and sad story. It certainly made me think about my own cruelties to others, while reminding the reader you never ever know how much small kindnesses may mean to another person. It also touches on the nature/nurture question, as Dahmer's mother had problems during her pregnancy with him, and the household, while forlorn, was certainly something many many other kids have weathered better than Dahmer did.