🍿 2022-10-06 12:16:33 – Paris/France.
“My friend Dahmer. » Design: Jesús Avilés/Infobae.
It's no secret that serial killers are great at selling. Be careful! I didn't say sellers. Just put one of them as the protagonist of anything and it will automatically go viral. Whether we like it or not, we will always be drawn to evil. There is in us an inexplicable curiosity for all that concerns these disturbed types.
These days the hottest character on Netflix is Evan Petersplaying the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the ten-episode mini-series that ranked first in the list of most-watched productions on the platform worldwide.
The figure of "The Butcher of Milwaukee" has been covered in various documentaries, films and books. The most recent precedent is my friend dahmerthe movie directed by marc meyers and interpreted with common sense by ross lynch. The film was released in 2017 and explored a previous side of the character, before his training went wild and he started killing out of control.
my friend dahmer It is based, in turn, on the graphic novel written by Backderf, of the same title, released in Spanish by the Astiberri label, in 2014. The story is told from the point of view of Backderf himself, who was Dahmer's classmate during his high school years. In the 224 pages that make it up, the book manages to accurately document the progressive decline of the assassin.
The character is described as a complex, solitary, withdrawn guy. Someone far more withdrawn than the media has exposed after these years. He wasn't the typical character who ends up becoming a serial killer. Dahmer, to tell the truth, was a curious, odd guy, with an inability to sympathize with others, but a good guy, ultimately.
Many publications and products that have sprung up around the Dahmer figure, as seen in the Netflix miniseries, have been given away to capitalize on the character, taking advantage of people's curiosity. In the case of My friend Dahmer, Blackderf was not opportunistic. A journalist by profession, whose work was already published in the press before the release of the comic, she felt the need to tell her version of the character, without any other intention of trying to understand this boy she was used to. to ride in a car with during his youth and who ended up becoming the assassin we all know today.
In the work it is possible to see that in reality Blackderf and Dahmer were not such close friends. Blackderf was more the guy who laughed at him with other kids and the would-be killer was just trying to fit in, a victim of his sickly shyness and unusual hobbies like browsing dead animal organs and preserving carcasses. formaldehyde
They were neighbors, attended the same classes, and shared some of the same anxieties that all teenagers experience, but in Dahmer's case, those anxieties became harmful.
Throughout the pages, the reader enters the life of this turbulent character and reflects on the possible triggers of his condition. The abandonment of his mother and the neglect of his father, the mockery from which he suffered from his peers, his exaggerated taste for taxidermy and the desire not to be alone, led him to plunge into alcohol when he was under eighteen, as a way to displace all those feelings that made him unhappy. And there was his biggest mistake.
In 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer turned to alcohol during his senior year of high school. With no one home to even give her a hug or watch over her care, her urges overflowed. That year, three months after graduating, he took the life of his first victim: a 19-year-old boy named Steve Hicks.
Dahmer has always felt different, but like any murderer, there are episodes in his life that trigger his impulses. Dahmer felt pleasure for human organs, he was homosexual, alcoholic and necrophiliac, he was also alone and feared abandonment. Would it have been different if he had had a sweeter life? The question is unnecessary now, but it's a question we all ask and one that Blackderf himself had in mind when telling this story.
Reading is uncomfortable, to be honest. The subject is not at all funny, even if it is interesting. We witness the testimony of someone who was close to him, before everything broke loose, and we even feel empathy for this subject that life has abandoned just because. The story is not pretty, but catchy, and therein lies the author's success.
At the time, Robert Crumb said Blackderf's work was powerful and very well told, and that its author "knows how to use comics to tell this story of a really weird and sinister 1970s teenage world." James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential, meanwhile, spoke of very solid work that leaves readers "devastated".
In 2014, the work won the Revelation Prize at the Angoulême International Comic Festival and the following year it was nominated for Best Foreign Play in the Barcelona International Comics Fair.
On October 7, the documentary series The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, part of the Conversations with Assassins series, will premiere, also on Netflix. Now seems like a good time to read Blackderf's graphic novel, because nothing will ever be enough to understand the mind of a character like this.
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SOURCE: Reviews News
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