My Friend Dahmer

The first panel depicts a long, undulating country road in black and white, and a lone boy walking alongside it with his back towards the reader. The following panels focus on the boy’s feet mid-stroll as he comes across a dead cat. The boy, his face in shadow, picks up the carcass and walks to the back of his house. There he meets three boys cutting through his property, who are displeased to see him. He tells them he plans to dissolve the cat “in some acid” (21), which his chemist dad owns. He leads the boys to his “hut” where he keeps jars of dissolving dead animals. Disgusted and scared, the boys ask him for an explanation, and he replies, “It interests me. What’s inside a body” (23), his face covered in shadow and sweat. One of the boys disbelieves him; this angers him, so he smashes one of the jars, the smell of acid rising in a cloud from the jar’s carcass. The boys run out of the hut, and one of them yells: “GAWD, DAHMER!! YOU ARE SUCH A FREAK!” (26). In the final panel, Dahmer stands alone, his head bowed, and his shadow looming large along the road.