HANGING WITH DAHMER

From this week's Spike Report, a regular feature of the Online Journalism Review, which mines the best of the web.

....Jeffrey Dahmer was not a popular kid, says artist John Backderf.

Backderf, who (as "Derf") draws the syndicated comic strip "The City," grew up with Dahmer near Cleveland. Backderf's new graphic novel, "My Friend Dahmer," is based on the artist's teenage acquaintance with the future serial killer; the comic depicts Dahmer as an alcoholic loner with no social skills, largely ignored and avoided by his classmates.

"I first met Dahmer in seventh grade, when the wretched contents of the district's three elementary schools were hurled together into the hormonal hell that is junior high." a href="http://www.derfcity.com/crap/jd1.html">The first chapter of Backderf's raw, grim and unsettling Dahmer comic is posted on the artist's Derfcity site.

As DME readers may, or may not, remember, Jeffery Dahmer was denied his last meal when he ended up on the business end of a jailhouse shank.