My Friend Dahmer

The narrator, Derf, meets fellow seventh grader Dahmer at Eastview Junior High in 1974. Dahmer is a shy boy, a “social invalid,” shown with an angular face, blonde hair, and heavy glasses; other boys often tease him, calling him “Dumber.” Derf is Dahmer’s partner in biology class. Dahmer does his part but also takes interest in a jar containing a fetal pig.

Despite the school being overcrowded with students, Dahmer is “the loneliest kid I’d ever met” (33), never making any friends. Later that day, Dahmer steals the fetal pig.

Dahmer lives in the countryside, outside the city of Akron, Ohio (once prosperous before going bankrupt during the recession in the 1970s). While seemingly peaceful and safe, rural life also becomes “the unlikeliest of breeding grounds for the most depraved serial killer” (37). Dahmer enters his house, eyes empty and gaze indifferent. In his hut, Dahmer takes the pig from his backpack and dissects it.

Dahmer lives with his parents and younger brother. His father, Lionel, is a chemist, an intellectual disinterested in children. His mother, Joyce, is “odd. Very moody and fragile” (40), and spends time with an interior decorator who suffers from cerebral palsy. The Dahmers live in the woods, away from the suburban neighborhood, “the house itself mirrored Jeff’s isolation” (41). Dahmer’s parents argue all the time, and he himself lies in the darkness and listens. However, in tenth grade he changes (this panel is painted completely black).

In 1975, at Revere High School, a sophomore Dahmer pretends to have “fake epileptic fits” (47) in the school library—and all the students laugh, fascinated by his imitation of cerebral palsy. Derf wonders why Dahmer’s behavior failed to attract the attention of staff, but concludes that there are many students with similar patterns of behavior (a boy named Lloyd Figgs is depicted throwing a tantrum). Dahmer is now tall and muscled, but he walks stiffly, his arms to the side, and has a “stony mask of a face” (50). He changed from “shy geek to spaz freak” (51), amusing the other students. While Derf constantly thinks of girls, Dahmer obsesses over a young male jogger who runs past his house. However, in his fantasies, the jogger is dead.

Dahmer’s antics make him popular at school, but he continues to obsess over the jogger, so he decides to wait in ambush for him in the woods—but the jogger does not appear.

Derf likes Dahmer, but “something creepy” wards him from trying to socialize with him outside of school. While Derf’s life is similar to Dahmer’s on the surface (their fathers are both chemists, and they both have a younger brother), Dahmer lives in a terrible household. Dahmer’s mother suffers from drug addiction and depression, her fits being the source of inspiration for Dahmer’s “act.” Derf justifies his own inaction in helping Dahmer by asserting that he was a child living in a different time—but he does pose the question, “Where were the damn adults?” (67). 

Dahmer goes fishing at his friend Neil’s man-made lake. They talk about a girl from their school who died by suicide. When Dahmer catches a fish, his face is once again drawn in shadow; instead of throwing the fish back in the lake, he starts to sweat, pulls out a penknife, and brutally butchers the animal. Neil yells at him, but Dahmer says, trance-like, “I just wanted to see what it looked like” (78).

Now juniors, Derf frames Dahmer as knowing he was unwell, “but there was no one he could turn to for help” (81). Dahmer starts to drink heavily to numb himself, even in school, yet not a single teacher reacts. Even for the “free” 1970s (in which students were known to smoke marijuana in the bathrooms), Dahmer’s habit is alarming; but in hindsight, a school councilor says, “I can’t say there were any signs he was different or strange” (85). Derf wonders if Dahmer would’ve become a serial killer had a single adult reached out to him. He sees his former classmate as a “tragic figure,” albeit an unsympathetic one.

While Derf experiences a normal day during the winter of 1976, shoveling snow with his brother and watching a sports game on TV, Dahmer sits alone as his parents constantly fight. He leaves the house, and instead of using acid to dissolve dead animals, he begins to strip their flesh with a knife deep in the woods.

During a week-long school trip to Washington D.C., Dahmer stops drinking. On a free day, he, Neil, and their friend Penny visit the office of vice president Walter Mondale.

Back home, Dahmer relapses. Derf doesn’t see him during the summer of 1977, but Dahmer’s neighbors often spot him in the woods beating trees with heavy sticks. Dahmer’s parents finally split up, and his father leaves the family home; the divorce is a messy affair. Derf asserts that Dahmer’s parents abandoned him at a crucial moment in his life, as he was slipping into insanity. Dahmer baits a stray dog to his secret place in the woods, intending to kill it, but he relents at the last moment. Derf claims, “It was also the last time he would show mercy” (106-107). The final panel shows Dahmer sitting on his sacrificial stone, caressing a skull.