Image courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival

Climbing the stairs to the attic studio of graphic novelist John Backderf (Derf), the walls are covered with framed comic original art from Bazooka Joe, Dick Tracy, Shannon Wheeler, and This Modern World. His workspace is modest but colorful – recycled Dominos’s plastic cups are filled with pens and markers, toy cars are displayed.

We interrupted him in the middle of his workday in Shaker Heights, Cleveland. It’s about thirty minutes from Derf’s hometown of Richfield, Ohio, where his wildly successful graphic novel My Friend Dahmer is set. “It’s good to be from someplace,” Derf said.

We had come to interview him in anticipation of the new film adaptation of My Friend Dahmer, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on April 21st (and be screened five more times at TFF between now and April 27). In fact, during high school, Derf and notorious serial killer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, were classmates, friends even.

Did you turn down many offers for screenplay adaptations for My Friend Dahmer?

Yeah, I’ve turned down offers before. The book took 15 years to pull together and had several incarnations along the way. It’s a compelling story, and I had pitches floating around as I fished for a publisher, so there was always interest. Filmmakers were immediately attracted to the idea and the concept. I was always willing to listen to offers while I was working on it, but I wanted to finish the book first. I wanted to make the book I had in my head. I wanted it to exist, as an artifact. Once I was done with it, and the book was out there, and it was a critical and commercial hit – which it was right from the start – if a filmmaker wanted to adapt it at that point, I was like, “Sure, why not? It won’t change the book.” The pressure is on the film to live up to the book. I’m happy to report that the film is very good.

But my favorite offer came around late 2007 or 2008 from a large studio in Hollywood. I had a relationship with someone at a comic strip syndicate, he liked my Dahmer stuff and he started pitching it around Hollywood. There was a studio that was interested and the syndicate guy advised me to get an agent, because it was looking good. So we all had a conference call. The studio exec starts out with, “I really see this as a John Hughes-type teen comedy.” I just stared at the phone in disbelief and the conversation ended pretty quickly. That’s the kind of stuff I was dealing with.

How involved have you been in the production of the film?

I gave notes on the screenplay but I wasn’t interested in getting too involved. I had books to make. My breakthrough work came so late in life, I was 52 years old when My Friend Dahmer was released. My plan is to make as many books in the time I have left and not get sidetracked by anything else. I chose the filmmaker, Marc Meyers, that was my main contribution. He approached me and I checked out his work. Here was a guy who made quiet, smart movies for adults and I thought, “This is what I’m looking for.” I said, “Pull together financing and we’ll give it a shot.” He did. The next thing I know I’m walking up the driveway of Dahmer’s boyhood home where much of the movie was filmed. Vincent Kartheizer was there and he’s like, “It’s so good to meet you,” and I met Anne Heche, who gave me a big hug. The whole thing was kind of a head-trip. I was on set for a couple of days but I was in Europe for most of the time that they were filming. The actor who plays Dahmer, Ross Lynch, is amazing. He is really going to blow people’s minds with his performance, I think. All the performances in the film are very, very strong.

Did you and Alex Wolff spend time together to help him understand the role?

I didn’t meet Alex until a couple weeks into the shooting. I had a bunch of pressing deadlines and couldn’t make the schlep out to the high school they were using as a set. He came to the role simply from reading the book and the screenplay, and from the director’s instructions. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Marc and he was making notes the whole time. I thanked Alex for making me WAY cooler than really was in high school!

Besides it being a film and not a book, what is the main difference in the way the story is told?

Everything important in the book is in the film. It’s a very, very faithful adaptation. Every important scene is recreated faithfully. I’m very pleased. The only real difference is the timeline is compressed somewhat. The book takes place over six years. That was simply a necessary adjustment for a film.

The major difference is the film doesn’t use the narration that I employ in the book. It’s a device I’ve only used in this one book. So it’s akin to Blade Runner. Narration, or no narration? For the record, I like the Blade Runner narration, too. I know I’m in the minority there.

What is the underlying theme of this story?

It’s a story about failure. Everyone fails – the parents, the teachers, the cops, his neighbors, his friends, and Jeff himself. The result is a pile of bodies. Across the board failure, sometimes that’s the way life is. But there were so many missed signs. I remember Jeff bringing liquor to school and walking through the halls with it. There’s a photo of him holding a styrofoam cup in the front of the book. He got it out of the coffee machine. He’d fill it with booze and walk around school with it…every day! You could smell it on Jeff’s breath. And no teacher or administrator noticed a thing. The drinking was scary, this wasn’t just stoner partying. That’s one of the things that made me think, “Enough! Something is deeply wrong with this kid.”

But it was a laissez-faire era. Kids were mostly on their own. Lots of cruising, lots of weed, lots of beer. Richfield and Revere High School during that time period was a lot like the movie Dazed and Confused.

Tell me about your education and how it influenced your career.

I got a D in art my senior year of high school for drawing too many comics. I went to art school briefly at the Pittsburgh Art Institute and didn’t like it. I only went for 6 months. I came back home and, worked as a garbage man for a year, and then I wound up at Ohio State University. I didn’t set foot in an art class there and instead studied journalism. I liked all of the journalism classes, but I loved working for the school paper more than anything. The Lantern had a distribution of over 50,000 – it was the first place I got my comics printed and it was the first place people really noticed my work. It’s a big rush when that happens and I’ve been chasing that rush ever since. Drawing these cartoons with 50,000 people reading them – if you blew one, which happened frequently, it was a pretty public failure. It was a real trial by fire. I loved it.

Coincidentally, The Revere High School paper was also called The Lantern. I was part of that, too. My cartoons then were completely inscrutable. It was all stream of consciousness stuff and no one knew what I was writing about.

How did you get interested in comics?

Trapped out in Richfield, it was kind of hard to get your hands on them. I started with mainstream comics that I bought at the corner drugstore. Later I discovered underground and indie comics. I had to drive into Cleveland to find those. As far as how they influenced me, I don’t have any direct influences. I just kind of do my own thing. But I’ve always loved comics, all of them— comic books, comic strips, cartoons, anything I could get my hands on.

Harvey Pekar said, “Comics could do anything that film could do…” Do you agree with this?

Film and comics have always been closely associated. Comics came first! It’s no surprise that so many movies coming out are based on them. Of course, they’re mostly stupid ones. I’m not a big fan of “superdude” stuff. Diary of a Teenage Girl just came out, that was great. Then there’s Jessica Jones – Brian Michael Bendis, the creator, he’s another Clevelander. There’s Ghost in a Shell, another big blockbuster that sounds like it doesn’t live up to the original comic.

Of course, Disney and Warner own Marvel and DC respectively, so the superdude assault on the multiplex won’t be ending any time soon. But let’s try to sneak in a few good comics, shall we? Hopefully, My Friend Dahmer opens the door a little more to great, non-superdude comics getting made into films. We’re in a golden era of comics right now. There are so many great books out there.

What are you working on now?

Two graphic novels at once. One of the books uses the characters from my first book, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, which was set in Akron and Richfield, Ohio. It’s a great cast, especially my protagonist, Otto, who is easily the best character I’ve ever dreamt up. I love writing him. The new book picks up a year after the first. I moved the location to Cleveland and it’s set in Kay’s Bookstore, which was this legendary place full of strange characters. It takes place during the Cleveland punk era of the early Eighties. The villain of the story is Frank Spizak, the Nazi transvestite race killer. He was a clerk at Kay’s. Really. That’s true! I have all of these stories about him working there. The other book, which will be for Abrams, I can’t talk about yet.

Do you ever worry about any repercussions from writing about such a sensitive subject – from the school, from families, or just emotionally?

By the time I sat down to write My Friend Dahmer, Jeff had been dead for 18 years. During those nearly two decades, there were four feature films about Dahmer, hundreds of books and thousands of magazine and newspaper articles. There are two different Jeffrey Dahmer action figures. There are three death metal tribute albums, all of which include songs about my friends and I. Dahmer has been a character on Saturday Night Live and a character on South Park. Given all that, I don’t think my haunting memoir, laced with regret and second-guessing, is going to add to anyone’s pain.

As for our antics back in high school, well, I think everyone winces at their behavior in high school. It certainly wasn’t our finest hour, some of those tasteless things we did – but we’re talking about young kids living in a podunk town. If we were doing the same things now as adults, like a certain politician who mocks handicapped people on stage, it would be different.

The only thing you can do is write with brutal honesty. That’s the only way to write a memoir – don’t be afraid to make yourself look like an asshole. You can’t sanitize it. I think I approached My Friend Dahmer with sensitivity. Its reception from critics and fans is testament to that. The biggest downside of the runaway success of the book is that I doomed myself to talk about Jeffrey Dahmer for the next twenty years.

Journalist Madeline Rosene can be reached via Instagram.