My Friend Dahmer

My Friend Dahmer is Derf Backderf's graphic memoir recounting his teenage friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer before he became one of America's most notorious serial killers. Set in Milwaukee during the 1970s and early '80s, the book follows both boys through Eastview Junior High and Revere High School — a period marked by bullying, isolation, and the slow hardening of Dahmer's pathology. Told in stark black-and-white panels, Backderf reconstructs their shared adolescence: Dahmer's binge drinking, his obsession with roadkill, his desperate need for attention, and the failure of every adult around him to see what was already forming beneath the surface. It is a rare work that forces readers to confront how proximity can mask evil until it is too late.