It’s always fun to be underestimated! It’s not just MFD. Most people who knew me from the crazed humor of "The City" are astounded I had something like this in me, which makes me smile. My Friend Dahmer is very dark and delivers an emotional punch to the gut. The artwork has rich detail that simply isn’t possible in a small comic strip. I said, “Dude, you HAVE to take off those glasses or I can’t talk to you.” Ross tells that story often.įor our readers who remember you from "The City" … what will surprise them about the book and the movie?
One time in particular, I was chatting with Ross between scenes when he was in his full Dahmer get-up, and it freaked me out. The actors were all calling themselves by their film names, so Alex Wolff went by “Derf” and Ross Lynch answered to “Jeff.” That was a bit of a head-shaker, especially since Ross looked so much like Dahmer when he was in costume. Honestly, I didn’t have much of a reaction. What was it like to see yourself portrayed on screen for the first time? So it wasn’t really as scary as you would think. Once I started working in earnest on the book, however, I shoved all the emotional stuff aside and just concentrated on the nuts and bolts of making comics, figuring out how to compose scenes, and concentrating on details. That was a very disorienting experience and took some time to come to terms with. Everything was redefined in a completely sinister way. Remember, my entire personal history changed in an instant in 1991. Phoenix New Times readers will remember Derf from his satirical, provocative cartoon strip "The City," which ran in New Times and more than 100 other alternative papers for more than a decade beginning in the '90s.ĭerf: Y’know, the book took so long to finish, 20 years, that it became more about process than about getting inside Jeff’s head. Not that there weren’t emotional hurdles.
Derf, who worked part-time as an artist, was off the day in July 1991 that he got the call from Sheryl about his friend Dahmer.
Alex Wolff portrays Derf.įull disclosure: Derf, his wife, Sheryl Harris my wife, Deb Van Tassel, and I all worked at the Akron Beacon Journal in the 1990s and were members of the team that won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service for our examination of race relations in the city.
Former Disney star Ross Lynch plays the serial killer. The movie adapted from the memoir opens Friday in Phoenix. They grew up in the 1970s in Bath, Ohio, a suburb of Akron that is the definition of the cliche "bucolic." Bath borders the 33,000-acre Cuyahoga Valley National Forest it's so pricey now that Lebron James lives there.ĭerf produced two shorter versions of the book before the international best-seller was published in 2012. That moment was also the beginning of a 26-year odyssey into the mind of his classmate at Revere High School in northeast Ohio.