My Friend Dahmer

I have a curious connection to this book and its author, besides the fact that we're both from the greater Cleveland area -- and that connection, oddly, extends to Jeffrey Dahmer himself. All three of us were born within the same year, growing up in Northeast Ohio in the 1960's and 70's, and all three of us had fathers who were research chemists. Our houses were all pretty much the same, and were no more than 25 miles apart. And yet one of us became a college professor, one a comics artist and graphic novelist, and one the most notorious serial killer of the twentieth century. I've met Derf a few times, most recently when he gave a talk at RISD, and I've been a fan of his work since coming across his strip, "The City," which used to run in the Providence Phoenix.  The original "My Friend Dahmer" -- a 24-page "floppy" that Backderf put out in 2002 on his own dime, was a masterpiece (and is now a collector's item), but its author was not satisfied. He threw his energies into a muli-year revision and expansion, drawing upon every available source, including interviews, press reports, and material from Dahmer's time in prison. The result is this expanded and definitive My Friend Dahmer.

High school in suburban Ohio in the 1970's was its own strange territory. Looking back on it, the wonder seems that those of us who got through it got through it at all. A telling point is depicted by Derf, when thanks to a phone call from a friend, he hears of Dahmer's arrest and sudden rise to infamy. The friend asks him to "guess who" it was, and Derf's first guess isn't Dahmer! It was a time of counter-cultural resistance, but yet still a time of compliant surface normalcy. Everyone in the classroom appeared more or less normal, but who knew what the kids did when school was out? Smoking joints behind the bus garage, collecting roadkill in jars, coming to class drunk, making Eagle scout, trading some "lids" (an ounce of marijuana) for "soapers" (Quaaludes, a popular recreational sedative) in the school parking lot, and singing in the church choir -- any one of one's classmates might do any or all of the above. In that deeply camouflaged world, a young man named Jeffrey Dahmer could blend in, hide out, become almost invisible as it were.

A sample of "The City"

Derf has a very distinctive graphical style. You'll notice his disinctive shading, which often makes use of tiny black batarangs; a slight chunkiness of facial features which emblazons each head with its distinctive mugshot, and the occasional use -- particularly when Dahmer's face is in the headlights -- of extreme shadows and angles reminiscent of an Orson Welles movie. Within that same stylistic compass, buildings and rooms are realistic in form; as part of his dedication to visual accuracy, Derf employed reference photos to compose interior and exterior "shots," much as would a film director. And again, in a very cinematic manner, Derf's square boxes of commentary have the ring of a voice-over by a hardboiled detective, as in this description of Dahmer's dad: "Lionel was a chemist, hardworking and driven . He was a nice man, but had a forceful personalty and an intimidating intellect." Think Dragnet meets Bladerunner.

But in an important way, My Friend Dahmer is almost a documentary -- albeit one with Derf's particular point of view, as he was a witness to some (though far from all) of the transit of Dahmer's teenage years. There are autobiographical elements, including some of the sketches that he did of Dahmer at the time. But the effect, in total, is much like a dramatic film, albeit one that's far more faithful to the premise "based on a true story" than anything Hollywood churns out. The message, as we begin our tale, seems to be that having Jeffrey Dahmer as our classmate is something that could have happened to any of us -- and that, in the tea-leaves of that time, his future was not yet possible to read.

NB: For those who might be interested, there's a film based on the graphic novel, starring Disney Channel veteran Ross Lynch as Dahmer. It's available free via Amazon Prime, or at a modest cost via a wide variety of streaming services. 

Fun Home

With Fun Home, we're crossing two imaginary lines: first, from graphic adaptations of things that already existed as "text only" -- and second, from allegories, novels, and other fictions into the nonfictional space of  the memoir. In a way, it's a move toward a kind of directness -- there's no intervening "original" to worry about -- but also to a kind of indirection, as memoir is a genre that allows for its own peculiar degree of fictionalization. Literature has seen many "semi-autobiographical" first novels; it's not unusual for the first story a writer tells to be closely based on her own; with memoirs, albeit they are quite openly based on the writer's own experience, the narrative is inevitably shaded by selection of memory -- which story to tell, and how -- so much so that many memoirs may be said to fall into the emerging category of "creative nonfiction."

Fun Home is all that and a bag of chips. There are layers within layers, all deftly handled with the sharpened pens and words of Alison Bechdel. Bechdel, who rose to fame on the basis of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, was already a veteran of the form when she sat down to frame her life within the squares of graphical narrative. You'll see her eye for detail -- particularly in the house itself, with all its fixtures -- and her subtle use of blue shading, which gives the story a familiar feel, as though we were invited to look in on her life. That same feeling shaped the Broadway musical adaptation, with an adult Bechdel walking through scenes from her own life, enabling both the recreation of the past and her ironic commentary on that recreation (it played in Providence a few years ago, but if you haven't seen it, you can get the feeling for it by watching a clip, or listening to the soundtrack).

An author, we must admit, it the best authority when it comes to her own life -- and yet much of Fun Home revolves around Bechdel's father, himself a riddle wrapped within an enigma wrapped within a deeply closeted man running a funeral home. The genius of the book is that, without ever fully unwrapping all those layers, or resolving all the enigmas of his life and death, we come to see him both through the eyes of a curious daughter and the gaze of that daughter's adult self, more critical and distanced, but still a sort of sweet regard. A great deal of time passes in this book, and we pass with it, growing up as it were alongside Bechdel.

There's lots to talk about here -- her singular visual style, her treatment of time and space, even the lettering (for which Bechdel commissioned her own font). So let's get started!