Word: dahmer
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...lives, or tells really good anecdotes. Within the last two months the Cleveland-based artist J. Backderf, who signs his work "Derf," has released two outstanding examples of the latter. "Trashed" (Slave Labor Graphics; 48pp.; $6.95) recounts his days as a college-drop-out garbage man. "My Friend Dahmer" (Derfcity Comics; 24pp.; $2.95) tells of Backderf's remarkable high-school relationship with notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The funniest book of the year so far, followed by the creepiest, and it's all true...
Just as "Trashed" tops the "shitty job" genre of anecdotes, "My Friend Dahmer" blows away ordinary I-knew-them-when stories. Taking it for granted that you know about Dahmer's crimes, Derf dispenses with them. Instead, with chilling details he provides a personal portrait of the high-school-age Dahmer at exactly the point when he went over the edge, killing his first victim a few months after graduation. As Derf recounts, Dahmer's behavior became increasingly bizarre: faking epileptic seizures, imitating cerebral palsy, drinking six-packs of beer every day before school, and becoming so numb to school...
...young woman and taunts the detective who flies out to Alaska to find him. "It's two opposite extremes: Pacino playing a cop who can't sleep and me playing this devil's advocate with him." Williams prepared for the role by watching tapes of an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer--"to get his conversational tone; it was so calm." Death to Smoochy is a comedy but not a light one. He plays a TV clown who, incensed at being replaced by Smoochy, a big fuchsia rhinoceros, tries to rub out his successor...
...tends to be overwhelmed by wanton outpourings of id - the literature on tattooing and body-piercing and drugs and grim sexual mess (domination, S&M and the like), and CDs of rock bands with names taken from an obsessed, sophomoric metaphysics of death. In the democracy of trash, Jeffrey Dahmer achieves afterlife as Hannibal Lecter. The atmosphere of mutilation and stupidity and sickness and unhappiness and emptiness is suffocating. It is the culture of Columbine. To refuse to speak ill of this stuff ("Oh, that's just another right-wing Bill Bennett type talking") is like refusing to oppose cancer...
...himself into a hell of a competitive lather. But then, so did General George Patton, another field commander with a winning record who came close to destroying his own career by slapping shell-shocked soldiers in Army hospitals. Bobby admits he has "a temper problem" - which is like Jeffrey Dahmer saying that he suffers from an eating disorder...