My Friend Dahmer

One of the advantages of graphic novels over written prose is their ability to utilize visual text as symbolic accompaniment to a given work’s themes. Backderf uses shading in his drawings and bolds his lettering to significant symbolic effect.

To illustrate Dahmer’s inner turmoil, Backderf often draws his face in various degrees of shade, rarely revealing it in full. The reader almost never sees Dahmer’s eyes, which indicates others’ inability to read his turmoil as well. For the most part, Dahmer is framed as a cypher, a mystery, a hulking individual of awkward stance with no discernible expression. This indicates Dahmer’s lack of empathy and his failure to connect with anyone on a personal level. In later parts of the novel (especially Part 5), even the panels themselves get darker and darker, symbolizing Dahmer’s descent into madness and his gradual loss of the few human characteristics he possesses. The use of shading, the contrast between black and white spaces, highlights Dahmer’s duality as man and “monster.”

Backderf’s bolded words capture Dahmer’s (and frequently, the narrator’s) thoughts. Bolded words generally indicate important information, the author’s deliberate use of them giving certain words more weight, symbolizing truths hidden from view.