Some of the most observant readers will recognize his work, which he has practiced in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Playboy. After dropping out of art school, John Backderf studied journalism and was a press cartoonist for a long time under the pen name Derf. Fired after two years from the Evening Times in Palm Beach (Florida) for “lack of taste” reasons, he moved to Cleveland (Ohio) and gained some notoriety with The City, a comic strip published in the United States for twenty-five years in over 140 titles (Dallas Observer, Chicago Reader), slices of life that will remind French readers of Riad Sattouf’s The Secret Life of Young People.
In 1997, he started drawing, at Fantagraphics, “Zero Zero,” the story of his high school years in the small town of Richfield (Ohio) with Jeffrey Dahmer, who would become “the Milwaukee cannibal”. After a first self-published edition in 2002, My Friend Dahmer was fully published in 2012 by a major publishing house, Abrams ComicArts. In the meantime, he also released Punk Rock and Mobile Homes and Trashed (both at Cà et Là), based on his experience as a garbage collector after finishing his art studies, and won several prestigious awards including two Eisner Awards and the Revelation Prize at the Angoulême Festival.
