A comic about My Friend Dahmer

Indy comix creator Liz Prince has penned a comic about reading MFD for the first time.

You can read the entire piece on her site HERE.

Upcoming appearances

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been madly prepping for the Fall leg of the My Friend Dahmer book tour. 

First up is the SPX Comix Fest in DC, this coming weekend, Sept. 15 & 16. If you're anywhere near the nation's capital, this is not an event to miss for comics fans. And what a line-up of heavy hitters! Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, the Hernadez Bros., etc, plus hundreds of creators and publishers in the big hall.

All the info is HERE

The evening before SPX opens, I'll be up in Baltimore at Atomic Books for the SPXPLOSION! I"ll have a short presentation, along with five other notable creators, including the fantastic Box Brown and the stream-of-consciousness superpunk Josh Bayer.

Fans will be greeted. Books will be signed. Adult beverages will be served.

SPXplosion info HERE

Fangoria interview

HERE'S a Q&A with the iconic horror mag Fangoria. First of two parts. I was a regular reader of this mag right around the time the events in My Friend Dahmer took place! Too bad Starlog isn't still publishing.

Ebay riches for My Friend Dahmer fans!

Don't usually re-post items from the Derfcity blog, but this one is of special interest to My Friend Dahmer fans.

The original, out-of-print, self-published My Friend Dahmer comic book (above) that I put out in 2002 is now selling for $80 on ebay! If you have a copy, my advice is SELL NOW! 

Here's the story behind this book. I started work on the Dahmer story in early 1995, a few months after his death in prison. Before that, from 1991 when he was arrested and his grisly crimes revealed to the world, it had existed only as sketchbook notes and drawings. But after he was killed, I finally decided to see what I could do with this project. 

Over the next two years I drew six short stories. The few people I showed these two urged me to finish them and get them in print. So I sent the best of the stories to Fantagraphics' Zero Zero, a popular anthology title of the Nineties. They snapped it up right away and made it the lead story in the next issue. This received a nice buzz in the comics press and some good reader reaction, so in 1998, I sat down and wrote and penciled a 100-page graphic novel. This bears little resemblance to the graphic novel I eventually produced. It was really just a loose collection of Dahmer short stories. There was no overall story arch, and it wasn't researched at all, it was purely straight memoir. The artwork was a lot rougher, since I was still firmly entrenched in my comic strip style.

Above: devoted fangirl reads the original MFD on Youtube.

It was still pretty good, I thought. But I sure as hell couldn't convince anyone else of that! I spent the next four years trying to sell this book to a publisher, in vain. Every company in the biz turned me down!

So in 2002, frustrated and stonewalled, I self-published this 24-page floppy. The hope was it would generate some interest in the larger work I envisioned. That, in fact, didn't happen, but much to my shock this little comic became an instant cult classic! When the buzz died down, these stories were now seven years old. In the interim, I had produced Trashed, a more polished effort. At that point, I decided to chuck everything I'd done, broaden the scope of the project and start over. The result is the best-selling, critically acclaimed book that came out this year.

BUT... as a reward, just for you Derfcity readers, and the point of this post, my pals at SLG Publishing, the folks who put out Trashed, The City: Collected and Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, have a limited stock of this out-of-print comic. And they're selling it at the $2.95 cover price! Don't hesitate if you want a copy.

Yours for $329K

Dahmer's boyhood home, setting for much of My Friend Dahmer, is on the market. Musician Chris Butler,  the owner, has decided to sell and move back to the East Coast. You probably remember Butler's band, The Waitresses. That's our man playing guitar on the left.

Recreating the ' sinister Seventies adolescent world'

To shamelessly name drop here, Lev Grossman, the book critic for Time magazine, wrote that MY FRIEND DAHMER is "like Proust’s madeleine to anybody who was alive in the 1970′s." I freely admit my study of Proust, as a largely disinterested college student, is far in the rearview mirror and I had to Google "Proust's madeleine" to refresh myself on this particular literary device.

"Madeleine" is a technique developed by Proust. The author writes in such a way that his descriptive prose triggers similar memories in the reader, and, the theory goes, an emotional response based on those similar memories. In other words, reading MFD transports a reader (who remembers the Seventies) right back to that era, and invokes all the stress and sleaze and kitschy weirdness of that era. I wasn't trying to be highfalutin' about it, but Grossman is very perceptive here– that's no surprise, he is after all Lev Grossman!– and that is exactly what I was trying to do. This book is, after all, a period piece. We are all of us a product of our time and place. And so was Dahmer. I thought it was crucial to the story to detail what that time and place were like, because they were so very different than the current day. These are events that happened 34-40 years ago, after all. It's gratifying that so many reviewers have lauded my detailed portrayal of the era. It would be a very different book if I hadn't concentrated on that.

The kitschy monstrosity of a sign dates from my era. I was thrilled to find a pic of it. 

No way I could conjure up something like that on my own!

Which brings me to the Mall.

The Summit Mall on the suburban outskirts of Akron is the setting of one of the book's major, and most bizarre, scenes: Dahmer's Command Performance. Me and my friends paid Jeff to perform his strange antics in front of horrified shoppers in our local mall.

The Summit Mall opened in 1965, built by the infamous Edward DeBartolo, one of the pioneers of shopping malls. It was constructed on the very suburban edge of Akron, which at that time, was the southeast corner of Bath, our sleepy hometown. It was a godsend to the local teenage population, who suffered from the stultifying boredom of life in a small town. We Seventies kids were the first generation of mallrats. I myself spent endless hours here, flipping through the vinyl at Disc Records, or the blacklight posters at Spencer Gifts, searching (mostly in vain) for interesting books on comix at Waldenbooks, or simply following a fetching teenage butt as it wiggled throughout the mall. It wasn't a famous mall. It wasn't one of the biggest, or one of the most architecturally flamboyant. It was just a mall, no different than 100 others. But it was, sad to say, the center of my teenage life.

The Harvest House, opened onto the Mall. Dahmer famously knocked over diners'
water glasses here during the Command Performance.

So I was keen to recreate this place as accurately as I could. And that proved to be a problem. The mall is still there, but it has been remodeled many times and no longer resembles the mall of my youth. I needed to recreate that mall. Here's how I did it.

I'm a huge proponent of photo reference. I don't copy from photos when I draw, but I do pull details from them, building a setting with signature features almost the same way I draw a character's face. I collected a trove of reference photos for MFD, as I do with all my books, divided by chapter into separate files. I spent years steadily collecting the reference I knew I'd need. The Summit Mall proved to be tricky. Who, after all, takes pictures, of an inside of a nondescript mall in suburban Ohio? Keep in mind, this is long before the digital photography revolution. 

Taking pictures in the Seventies was a much more lengthy and expensive process. You had to take the photos, which you couldn't view after you shot them, so you had no idea if they were decent or even in focus. To shot inside, you'd have to use a large flash. And then have the film developed and prints made, unless you were a photo bug and your own home darkroom.  Average cameras were cheap crap back then, too, and didn't work well indoors, especially in large spaces. I exhausted all my sources looking for reference, the Akron library and the photo files at the Akron newspaper, and only managed to come up with a few precious visual clues. They proved to be just enough.

This is a floor plan from 1970. This was crucial, as it listed all the stores. Virtually all are long gone, so once I had those names I worked them into the scene. Store logos were surprisingly easy to find, since most advertised in the Akron paper and I had a pile of those from 1978. 

The above photo, from 1977, was the only decent one I found of the period Summit Mall. But it offered enough visual evidence to jumpstart my own memory banks. Look at the pic. Today's malls are soft, cozy places. The colors are muted, greenery is abundant, plump chairs and sofas offer respite for weary shoppers, and the lighting is soft and intricately designed. Compare that to the above photo. A mall in 1977 was all hard surfaces, shiny tile and metal storefronts and white ceiling tile. Lighting was fluorescent and harsh. Even the benches were hard and uncomfortable! No rest for you, consumer! Keep buying! I remember how shoppers clomped up and down the tile mall in their hard shoes and how voices reverberated off the cold surfaces. Muzak, not the actual tunes but dreadful "elevator music" versions, blared from tinny speakers. At the Hammond Organ store and salesman hauled an organ out into the mall and tempted shoppers with Barry Manilow tunes. A mall was a very noisy place.

Here's something I regret not working into this scene. Booklein was a newsstand in the center of the mall. Just look at this kitschy marvel! It was supposed to look like (I think) a shipping crate. The knotty pine, the Helvetica type, wonderful. Booklein, for those of you who don't know what newsstands were, sold magazines and paperbacks and out-of-town newspapers. Before the internet, a good newsstand was the internet. I was a pop-culture vacuum and spent a lot of time in newsstands, and this one in particular. I remember being in there one day, face buried in a National Lampoon or Creme, and suddenly Dahmer peered over one of the bookshelves and bleated loudly at me! 

So the Summit Mall, as I depict it,  is visually accurate, right down to the sign out front, the benches, the stores, even the kiosk that displayed a map of the mall so shoppers could find their way about.  Obsessive? Yeah, indisputably. But concentrating on recreating my teenage world was how I made this book, a dark and troubling tale, fun for me to produce. Even if the reader doesn't recognize that accuracy, I think he picks up on the layers of detail that I work into every scene. The result is a much, richer, complex work.

Dahmer and Death Metal?

I'm often asked what kind of music Dahmer liked. I wrote about this on the Derfcity blog a while back, but since I just received a couple more queries, I think I'll re-post it here.

The stereotype, of course, was that Dahmer listened to heavy metal. In 1978, that would have been Sabbath and Judas Priest. There wasn't much else. It was mostly kid stuff like Kiss and Alice Cooper. So he sat in his dark room, headphones on, blasting his brain with Priest's Beyond the Realms of Death. Except that's not what happened. 

This story comes from friend Neil, one of the small group of band nerds who befriended Dahmer in high school and formed the Dahmer Fan Club to egg him on in his various acts of weirdness. You'll read all in the book. Neil contributed much material, through many emails and conversations, as I was putting together this book over the past several years. But he dropped this tale on me top late, well after the book had been shipped to the printing plant.

In the Summer of 1975, between freshman and sophomore years, Neil and Dahmer went to a concert together. The Cleveland area, on the far edge of which our hometown was located, was known at that time as the Rock Capital of the World, due to several powerful FM stations and a huge, rabid rock fandom. There were many venues in the area where legendary concerts were held, but none was more beloved than Blossom Music Center.

Blossom Music Center and a sold-out show

Blossom was WAY out in the boonies, in the rolling countryside far south of Cleveland (it's now the Cuyahoga Valley National Park). It was an outdoor amphitheater, surrounded by a vast, sloping lawn where concert-goers could spread out with blankets and picnic dinners and enjoy a live performance. It opened in 1968 to serve as the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra (which it still is). Looking for extra revenue, the following year Blossom began booking rock acts and immediately became THE place to see live music.

The official capacity was 8,000. But because of its rural setting, fans would simply abandon their cars on the berms of the surrounding, gridlocked country roads and hike through the woods to crash the gates. There was no fence or barrier, the local police force was comprised of Goober and Barney, and Blossom security was totally overwhelmed as kids poured in from every direction. A Blood, Sweat & Tears concert in 1969 drew a crowd of over 80,000! It was Woodstock every weekend! Concert-goers drank wine out of sheepskin jugs and passed joints and bongs. A giant fog of pot smoke hung over the throng, at times obliterating the amphitheater itself. Couples frolicked naked in the nearby woods. All over the lawn, lovers crawled into sleeping bags to hump, the bags moving in time to the beat, like giant caterpillars.

I saw my first live music (and my first naked woman!) here. Tickets were so cheap, $4 a head, and it was so easy to sneak into a show, that it really didn't even matter who was playing. You went for the experience and to try to meet girls. Never had any success there, despite the frequent naked nymphs dancing through the crowd.

So in the Summer of 1975, Neil and Dahmer decided to attend a Blossom concert. Neil suspects it was Dahmer's first show. It may well have been his ONLY concert. Neither was driving yet, so Dahmer's dad , Lionel, drove them as close as he could to the Blossom entrance, until the traffic gridlocked and then the boys walked the rest of the way, probably a couple miles. Heck, the driveway into the grounds was a couple miles long, so it was likely a four-or-five-mile hike! Made a few of those myself. Lionel picked them up at the same spot at a designated time after the show. Traffic leaving Blossom shows was just as bottlenecked as it was before events. Many kids just slept in their cars until the following day!

The headliner for this show? Priest? AC/DC? Nope. Neil Sedaka!!!!! That's right, the chubby, little schlockmeister who penned some of the most vile Top 40 dreck of the Seventies!!! Friend Neil recalls that Dahmer was quite taken with Sedaka's music at the time. I had MY young guilty pleasures, too, before I discovered punk rock later in the Seventies and my tastes refined, but NEVER something THIS godawful!!

  

So the  bible-thumping, FoxNews crowd's insistence that heavy metal poisons the minds of America's youth doesn't apply to Dahmer. And the claims of today's metal crowd that Dahmer was one of them is equally false.  Much like  most of the urban legend that the Death Metal/ Serial Killer sub-culture has constructed out of Dahmer's life, it's bullshit. And now friend Neil confirms it.

This is especially hilarious considering how Death Metal has embraced Dahmer's story. The band Macabre released Dahmer back in 2000, a concept album devoted entirely to Jeff's life and killing spree. Here's a song from the album about our high school antics, Do the Dahmer. Yep. That's right. There's a metal tune about my high school career!

  

There's others. Apartment 213 (named after Dahmer's pad in Milwaukee) has released a number of albums, all featuring various photos of Dahmer on the cover. A Canadian metal band simply calls itself Dahmer and most of its discography is inspired by various aspects of his life and crimes. There's a Brit metal band called Trophies of Dahmer, referring, of course, to the heads and skulls he kept as "trophies." The metal community is fascinated with the guy, and views his miserable life as a mirror of the metal philosophy. Picked on and shunned as a kid, wallowed in misery and drink, and then snapped and got his "revenge." Blah blah blah. It's all total crap, of course.

A Neil Sedaka fan. Sorry, metalheads.