Derf Backderf is the author and creator of “My Friend Dahmer”. He was born and raised in Richfield, Ohio. Derf attended and graduated from Ohio State University. He has a degree in journalism. He has written other novels called “Punk Rock” and “Trailer Parks”. Derf is mainly focusing on is the mature audience because there are a few scenes in his book that a mature audience could handle to witness. Derf wants to address all the clues that his main character Dahmer was going through that the people who were around him that was overlooked that made him be known as the “The Milwaukee Monster”. Backderf wants his readers to analyze his artwork, understanding the different type of tones, and the word choices that Derf demonstrated in his book. …show more content…
When Dahmer was in high school he, had a difficult time making friends. The author states that “He was the loneliest kid” because Dahmer would always eat lunch by himself. In addition, Backderf said that Dahmer’s face appeared to him as a “Stony Mask”. His purpose for saying that is because Dahmer would not show any type of emotions. Backderf notice that Dahmer had a sudden change in his personality to “Shy Geek to Spaz Freak”. The author acknowledges that because when he was in high school with Dahmer, he missed all those signals that Dahmer was showing. Therefore, Dahmer began to have sexual thoughts of the jogger he would always see jogging dead corpse in his bed. Backderf said that Dahmer psyche “Gurgled Up”. The author purpose for saying that is that the monster that he has inside him has unreleased and that he has no control over it. Also, throughout the comic Backderf spoke of Dahmer parent’s relationship. In the comic Dahmer, mother was on the phone with the lawyer to finalize her divorce with Dahmer’s father. Backderf stated that it put an “emotional scar” on Dahmer because Dahmer was not getting the love and affection that he needed from his parents. Moreover, Derf chooses those word choices in his comic to describe Dahmer because he wants his readers to understand those words were true about him in his
Dahmer was fascinated and did not hesitate to touch or pick them up. According to Lionel Dahmer, he was "oddly thrilled by the sound they made. His small hands dug deep into the pile of bones.” At the age of six, it was discovered that he needed surgery to fix a double hernia. Following his surgery, which coincided with the birth of his brother,there was a drastic change in the once happy, bubbly, outgoing child. Lionel Dahmer states "he seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable... he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly
Dahmer, for example, essentially wanted others to be submissive to him; this served a basis for having his victims rendered unconscious before he did the truly disturbing aspects of his actions. He also craved the everlasting companionship that having corpses around could satisfy well enough because he also did not want them to leave, either. Suppressing his true feelings also played a major role in the attacks. He refused to share anything, so dark fantasies grew heavier in his mind and eventually led to 17 deaths. Finally, death fascinated him, as well as control, from a young age, which led to him killing and dissolving animals in acid. Simply put, Jeffrey Dahmer had predominantly selfish, compulsion-driven reasons for doing his crimes. In contrast, Grendel was only acrid that he did not have the comitatus that the Danes had. He also hated the songs about God that the people in Herot sang due to God exiling him. While Dahmer obsessed over the concept of death itself, Grendel was more obsessed with the act of killing, even getting giddy over seeing the sleeping warriors in the mead hall. As can be seen, Grendel and Dahmer had wildly different motives for committing their
When Sam Meeker returns home from college in the spring of 1775 and announces that he has decided to enlist in the Rebel army, his parents are appalled, but his younger brother, Tim, is wide-eyed with admiration. When the brothers are outside together doing chores around their family's tavern, Sam confides in Tim his plan to steal their father's gun in order to fight. Tim protests, but he can do nothing to stop Sam. That night, Mr. Meeker and Sam have an argument about the war and Sam runs away from home. The next morning after church, Tim visits Sam in a hut where he is hiding out. He tries to talk Sam out of going to war, but without success. In the hut, Sam's girlfriend Betsy Read asks Tim which side he supports, and Tim has trouble deciding
The book, Heat written by Mike Lupica, is a novel about a young boy named Michael Arroyo who faces many difficulties throughout the book, all for his right to play his beloved game of baseball. Michael lives with his dad, Papi, and his brother, Carlos. They are all Cubans who came to the United States for a better chance to follow their dreams. Papi always encourages Michael to play baseball and he always has high hopes for Michael’s career in baseball. It is right to believe in Michael so much because later he fulfills his father's dream for him. After Papi dies of heart failure, Michael still continues Papi dream for him, to be the Little League Champion. Throughout the book Michael meets two characters who have significant impacts on him,
were also very hard for the Dahmer family to deal with. To many it was
...nd Dahmer”, Jeff Dahmer would go to school noticeably under the influence, yet somehow go by “unnoticed”. If the teachers were aware of Dahmer’s state, they never took any form of action to discipline him, question him, or be worried with his condition at all. Not once throughout the entirety of the graphic novel does a teacher, student, or parent seem remotely concerned with Dahmer’s well-being. Dahmer fought off the urge to kill many times and did it with the help of no one and nothing other than his own twisted mind, so there is reason to believe any type of assistance from an adult could have been detrimental in the process of Dahmer overcoming his violent urges. Unlike Benjie, Dahmer had no one to look up to and admire. Benjie was eventually able to appreciate and respect Butler Craig as a man who cared enough about him to put Benjie’s life above his own.
Jeffrey Lincoln Dahmer also known as The Milwaukee Cannibal and The Milwaukee Monster was born May 21st, 1960 to his parents Joyce Annette and Lionel Herbert Dahmer. When Dahmer was six years old he had minor hernia surgery that afterwards changes in his behavior were reported. He went from a happy young boy to increasingly insecure and a loss in self-confidence, these changes seemed to coincide with the birth of his younger brother David Dahmer who was born seven years after him. At age eight Jeffrey and his family moved to Bath Ohio due to his father’s career as an analytical chemist. The move seemed to deepen his already increasing odd behavior and seclusion from society. By age fourteen he started to have impulsions to murder and perform necrophilia, these impulsions were amplified again when his parents ’marriage fell apart and they divorced in 1977.
Dahmer went as far as to dismember and store body parts throughout his apartment after killing them. He would sometimes even eat these dismembered body parts of the body. Some say he went so long without being caught. because he chose the ever shifting population such as drifters and prostitutes. who had no real identity.
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer gave birth to their first born, Jeffrey Dahmer, on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee. Despite Joyce experiencing a difficult pregnancy, Dahmer was a healthy child who was wanted and adored by both his parents. However, his mother did start to become distant to him as she refused to breast feed him and started demonstrating unstable behavior along with substance abuse. Meanwhile, his father was pursuing his doctoral for chemistry in Iowa which limited the time Lionel had with his family. At age five, Dahmer’s little brother was born and that was when the feeling of neglect set in him. For the first time, the little attention provided from his parents had to be shared with his brother David. Dahmer began displaying extreme shyness but also severe tantrums. During the ages of six and seven, Dahmer “was regarded by other children as odd and bizarre (Martens, 2005).” Even though he did not show any interest in developing genuine social relations, Dahmer did demonstrate a fascination with bug and animal dissections. When Dahmer was six he had “undergone hernia surgery, when he woke up from the anesthesia he was worried someone could have cut his genitals, the pain lasted for one week and after a long recovery period his parents remember he turned to be very loner (Giannetakis, n.d.).” It is believed that at age eight Dahmer had been sexually abused by a boy in his neighborhood (Hickey, 2013). If this event did occur, it could explain why he developed destructive sexual fantasies at the young age of twelve. Despite him being aloof, it has been reported that he would seek attention by faking epileptic seizures at school and local shops. By his adolescent years, he developed compulsive masturbation which would eventually lead to legal trouble (Silva, 2002). At the age of fourteen, Dahmer turned to alcohol abuse in order to overcome his feeling of despair and compulsive thoughts of sexual violent acts.
Print. The. “Dahmer, Jeffrey Lionel.” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Life. Ed.
Derk Backderf depended almost entirely on visual narrative and culture, which is anything where meaning is sought through images, to tell his story in his graphic novel My Friend Dahmer. He used words to tell his story, but he let the graphics speak to the emotions of the issues. He used the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words to help him inform and warn other people. His pictures depicted someone who looked fairly normal on the outside, but on the inside he was a monster who was trying to fight his inner demons through the abuse of alcohol.
Data has been collecting reporting that “31% of people who had both a substance abuse disorder and a psychiatric disorder (a "dual diagnosis") committed at least one act of violence in a year, compared with 18% of people with a psychiatric disorder alone. This confirmed other research that substance abuse is a key contributor to violent behavior” (Harvard Health Publishing). This can be applied to Dahmer’s case. It is said that after getting hernia surgery when he was four, Dahmer was never the same. He went from a regular playful child to a distant anxious one. When becoming an adolescent, one will develop an interest in concepts and hobbies. For Dahmer it animal carcasses. He would find roadkill, “dissect and dismember them. He explained that he wanted to know how each animal "fitted together"(Cahill). This could come off as creepy and off-putting, but he was not hurting anyone. It is believed that his parents’ constant fighting and moving was the catalyst in making his obsession with carcasses into a dangerous one. “Children from broken homes are nine times more likely to commit crimes than those from stable families” (Bloxham). His drive to kill could quite possibly be linked to the fact that he simply linked to his familial issues. These problems in the family are definitely linked to his drinking problems as well. Dahmer’s
Dahmer was always an outcast. In his early years, he seemed fascinated with death and dead animals. This carried on throughout his childhood. At puberty, not only was he a heavy alcoholic (first noted at age 14), but he was realizing he was gay. He had fantasies of a completely subservient partner whom he could totally control. These fantasies were
Abram Hoffer found that disruptive children consumed far less the optimum levels of vitamin B3 and B6 than did nonproblem youths (as stated in Schmallger 2014). I then speculated if the injections that Dahmer received could have in fact counter acted the necessary vitamins for normal brain growth. Researchers also have concluded that low levels of serotonin are directly related to a person’s inability to control aggressive impulses (Schmallger 2014). Could these injections account for a mental instability in Dahmer? I believe that the injections could have attributed to his inability to associate with his classmates and teachers causing him not to develop key fundamental social practices to help him transition into a larger scale of society. “One Swedish study that focused on variations in blood serum levels of two thyroid hormones, triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (FT4), found that elevated T3 levels were related to alcoholism and criminality” (as stated in Schmallger 2014). Modern science has allowed researchers to look in depth at these discoveries that indicate relationships between Dahmer’s behavior and chemical imbalance; nevertheless, these extensive studies can only allow us to look into a small portion of the actual causes of his
course of his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a week