Book tourin'

Sorry for the long layoff, friends. Sucking wind as the first leg of the MFD book tour winds down. Had a great talk and signing at Cleveland's Brooklyn Library last night. Thanks to all who packed the house and to the Cuyahoga County Library for putting on a successful event. That's about it for local appearances here in Ohio. Think I've reached the saturation point.

I have a break for the rest of July. Next stop is Chicago and the awesome Quimby's Books on Thurs., Aug 9 at 7 pm for my slideshow talk and a signing. Really looking forward to that one.

The book tour picks up again in the Fall, with appearances at the SPX Comix Fest in DC, the Miami Int'l Book Fest and the annual Conference of English Teachers in Las Vegas. Details to come, and very likely more events to be added. Stop on by if you're near any of these places. Always happy to meet readers and fans.

Derf on PBS

Here's a piece on the book by the Cleveland NPR outlet. This is a weekly show about Books and the Arts that runs on PBS-WVIZ. My bit is the lead piece. It starts off with the usual Q&A about what Dahmer was like, etc., but gets a little into into process and making the book later in the interview.

This was filmed at the William Busta Gallery in Cleveland, where I had my book launch. It was a terrific show and almost all the images in this piece were filmed off the gallery wall. A pity the thing didn't broadcast until the show had been down a month!

Get some nifty shots of my studio, too, if that sort of thing interests you.

Derf in Detroit & Chicago this week

Here's a radio interview with the NPR outlet in Detroit. HERE

Green Brain owner Dan Merritt, along with wife Katie, are well known figures in the comix world. 

I'll be appearing at the awesome Green Brain Comics in the Motorcity (Deerborn actually. No one lives in Dee-troit anymore) this Saturday, June 16 at 2 pm. I'll give a slideshow, followed by a Q&A and a book signing. 

And this Sunday, June 17, I'll be milling about the CAKE indy comix fest in Chicago. Don't be shy. Say howdy if you see me.

I'm also working on a solo signing in the Windy City later this summer. Stay tuned. Details to come.

Critical acclaim

The vast majority of reviews for My Friend Dahmer have been off-the-chart rave ones. I have never received this much coverage and acclaim for a book. And for that, I'm both pleased and grateful. 

But some reviewers of MFD pick a couple nits. These are mostly blog reviews, not ones from well-known critics. The most common complaint is that I blame adults for not stepping up, but don't own up to my own role in the Dahmer tale. This recent review, for example, takes issue with this:

The question Backderf doesn't seem quite brave enough to address is: "Where were the friends?" He doesn't cover up how he and his friends used Dahmer for their amusement and then ignored him when it suited them, but he doesn't go to the next logical step: what if they'd done something? Said something? Asked an adult to pay attention? He needs to take a harder look at his own role.

What this reviewer writes is true. I didn't say anything. I didn't approach an adult. But how does this reviewer know these things? It's in my book! Harder look? I spell out, with brutal honesty, how I pushed Dahmer away and cut him off, without a second thought or a backward glance. This scene, in particular, is often noted for its callousness:

Look, there are no heroes in this story. It's a tragedy. Everybody fails. But how does the reader know that I and my friends are part of that failure? Because I write it that way! So how is that not owning up to my own role? Hey, I could have made myself look better. Who, after all, would know the difference? A few of my high school friends, perhaps, but no one else. I chose not to do that. Going in to this project, I decided to be as frank and as honest as I could be. That, I think, is why this tales resonates as powerfully as it does. 

I also went to great lengths to detail the spirit of the times, since time and place are so crucial to a person becoming who they are, for good or bad.  Lev Grossman, the book critic of Time magazine, recognized this and wrote My Friend Dahmer is "like Proust’s madeleine to anybody who was alive in the 1970′s." "Madeleine" is a technique of writing in such a way that it triggers memories in the reader, and thus emotional responses that are attached to those memories. For people who grew up in the Seventies or Eighties, the adolescent world I re-create in MFD will be a very familiar one. For younger readers, that's not the case, but at least they get an accurate portrait of what that world was like, and, more importantly, how vastly it differed from their own.

A central pillar of the tSeventies teenage culture of that era was: you didn't narc on fellow student. Ever. To do so would would make a kid ostracized and shunned and very likely the target of retaliatory beatings. I simply wasn't going to risk that for a guy like Dahmer, someone I really didn't even like by that point. I think I make this very clear in the book. You can't approach this story using the standards of the present day. That is naive. The events of this book took place 35-40 years ago! It was an entirely different world.

I'm also not going retroactively apologize for my actions. Yeah, it was cold, but by the time I distanced myself from Dahmer, all sorts of alarm bells were going off in my head. And you know what? That was a pretty damn good instinct! That could well have been me, cut up in garbage bags in the trunk of Dahmer' car!

I feel that I hit the proper tone with the story. And the vast majority of readers and critics agree. I didn't want to be too obvious and beat the reader over the head. I believe the failure of the adult world, across the board, played a major role in Jeff the lost boy becoming Jeffrey the fiend. Obviously, I got that idea across. Once the adults failed, it fell to me and my friends and fellow classmates to stand up and sound the alarm. We didn't. We passed. And left Jeff behind without a backward glance or the slightest regret. I thought I got across that idea, too.

Weirdest fundraiser EVER

Last Sunday I went to a cookout at the Dahmer House.

Yeah, yeah, insert Dahmer cannibalism joke here. That was the point, actually. The house has been owned for some time by musician Chris Butler. Great guy and one of pioneers of the Akron Punk Scene, which I wrote about in my last book, Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, which if you haven't read, you should!  As I've written before, I tried to talk Butler out of buying the place, but him doing so in spite of my warning was an incredible stroke of luck for me, as it afforded me access to a major setting in My Friend Dahmer. I went in with my sketchbook and made numerous reference drawings, ones that helped me recreate a space I hadn't seen since 1978. Without that access, I never could have drawn an accurate version of the house.

Above: a 1950 photo speed on the house from the Akron Beacon Journal. The
Dahmers didn't move here until 1969. This is the living room. The house has been remodeled several times, so it took a little detective work and shaking loose some memories to recall what was where when Jeff lived here. 

Purely as a design object, it's a neat pad. Built in 1950, it's a fab mod abode with a lovely, wooded lot. Even so, this is a house that really should have been torn down in 1991, when Dahmer was caught and confessed his crimes. Only his first victim was murdered here. The rest of his spree took place in Milwaukee, most in his infamous apartment, which was demolished by the city. Now, I don't know what the financial circumstances in 1991 the then owners of this house faced. Very likely, they were just middle-class working folks and would have been bankrupted had they walked away from the place. It's a neat house, and Butler doesn't believe in ghosts, but it will always have its infamy. On the other hand, who better to live here than musicians? Fill the place with musical karma!

The living room today, with the "house copy" of MFD.

So what's the deal with this strange fundraiser, you ask? Butler got involved with the latest pledge drive for legendary college station WRUW, at Cleveland's Case-Western University. Cleveland's designation as the Rock-n-Roll Capital of the World is specious, but one thing it has never lacked is important and influential radio, from Alan Freed to The Mad Daddy to arena-rock inventors WMMS the Buzzard to ground-breaking, commercial-free stations like WRUW and Cleveland State's WCSB, "amateur" radio that ushered in the college rock era. I started listening to college stations in 1980 or so, when the then-all-powerful commercial stations refused to play punk rock. I'm still a fan, and often have WRUW playing as I draw. WRUW relies on listener donations for part of its budget and every year station folk put together various prizes that are auctioned off on air. This year one of those prizes, donated by Butler, was a cookout at the Dahmer House! Butler asked me to attend as a "celebrity" guest and since it was for a great cause and the whole thing was so delightfully weird and indefensibly tasteless, I agreed at once.

Also in attendance, were members of various Rubber City punk bands, musicians I looked on with awe and admiration as a snotty, 18-year-old fanboy from Dahmer High School, when their bands packed the legendary Bank Punk Club back in the Seventies (and folks I've since befriended). So, from my perspective, it was a mash-up of My Friend Dahmer and Punk Rock & Trailer Parks! Now how could I pass that up?

All in all, a very strange afternoon. 

Jeff the football hero

I thought I had found all my high school drawings of Dahmer. But two weeks ago, while cleaning out my Mom's basement, I pulled a box from under the stairs, one that was buried beneath a pile of other things. The box was full of old sketchbooks and drawings from high school. And as I leafed through these things, the hair stood up on the back of my neck again. Sure enough, there were several drawings of my old pal Jeff.

The above drawing is a preliminary sketch for one of the many football posters I drew during my senior year. A cheerleader came up to me in the art room one day and asked me to draw a poster for the upcoming game, one that would be hung at the main entrance to to school to "inspire" the players as they trudged in from the bus in the morning. Stunned that the cheerleader even knew my name, I agreed. That day after school, I created a 6-foot high poster with marker, rolling out the paper in the hallway outside the art room. It proved to be so popular with my fellow students, I was dragooned into drawing one before EVERY game for the entire season. 

The poster above is from halfway through the season. That's our "star" running back trampling a hapless opponent, who is, of course, Dahmer, yelling out his trademark bleat. Jeff usually lurked around school after hours, as I detail in the book. Mostly to drink in the woods near the school, but also to hang out with various members of the Dahmer Fan Club. I spent HOURS on these stupid posters and Dahmer often kept me company as I drew in the hallway. As the self-appointed Minister of Propaganda for the Fan Club, I was inserting my cartoon Dahmer into almost everything I drew: cartoons for the school paper and yearbook, student council posters etc. So naturally, I put him in these football posters, too.

The name "Footstool" on the back of his jersey is another related inside joke. Dahmer imitated his Mom's interior decorator, who suffered from cerebral palsy, as part of his bizarre spaz schtick. Jeff often joked that the only thing this guy added to the decor was one solitary footstool. Thus the jersey name.

Outside of the Fan Club, no one else in school got the inside gags. That was typical. We were simply amusing each other. But now, years later, these goofball drawings have a re-defined, utterly sinister, meaning. 

In the case of this drawing? "Crush the Comets"... that was the Coventry High Comets. Coventry is where Steven Hicks, Dahmer's first victim, lived. 

Look for some other recently discovered drawings in future posts.

The viral yearbook

This one went viral last week. A kid was leafing through his Dad's yearbooks and found a couple notes from Jeff Dahmer. He posted them online and it went viral.

Yes, these are authentic, yes, these are our yearbooks, and yes, I know who the dad in question, Ted, is. From what I hear, media people who inquired on this, were re-directed by Ted to me. This is not unexpected, given my book. I knew I was very likely turning myself into the local "Dahmer expert" when I decided to finish the project. Such is the price I must pay.

Everything associated with Jeff is spooky, of course, but what strikes me about these notes is the obvious disintegration. The above note is from the 1974 yearbook, from our freshman year. The handwriting is neat and steady. To be precise, we usually received out yearbooks at the start of the following year, so the precise date this was written was September of our sophomore year.

This one above is from our junior yearbook, two years later. Look at that shaky scrawl. It's very likely Dahmer was drunk when he wrote the second note, since by 11th grade he was in an alcoholic haze for most of the day. This serves as proof for what I describe in the book. Again, this book was distributed to students the following Fall, the precise date this was written was September of our senior year. Dahmer was lost by that point. There was very little of him left, except the monster.

The "Jeff Dahmer" signature was obviously added at a later date by Ted, probably in 1991 when all of us classmates were trying to figure out what artifacts we had in our possession. I think signing it "You know who" makes it even creepier!