Comics creator John Derf Backderf was born and raised in a small town on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio.
After a brief stint at art school, he dropped out and worked on the back of a garbage truck for a year, an experience that was the basis for his comics project, Trashed.
He later attended Ohio State University on a journalism scholarship. Derf began his professional career as a political cartoonist for a paper in South Florida, but was fired after two years for, as the editor put it, “general tastlessness.”
In 1990, his freeform comic strip The City debuted in alt-weekly newspapers, beginning a 24-year run. The City appeared in over 150 weekly papers around the country, including The Village Voice and The Chicago Reader.
When weekly papers began to fail, Derf abandoned strips for books. Derf’s most well-known work is My Friend Dahmer (Abrams ComicArts, 2012), a haunting account of his teenage friendship with the future serial killer. Time magazine listed it as one of the five best non-fiction books of the year. It has been translated into 15 languages. The film adaptation of My Friend Dahmer premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and played in cinemas in the US and abroad throughout 2017 and 2018.
In 2020, he released Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams ComicArts, 2020). It was named book-of-the-year by Publisher’s Weekly. Kent State won the Eisner Award for Best Nonfiction Graphic Novel, and a Ringo Award in the same category, as well as the French Critics’ Prize.
His latest book is The Dissidents (Abrams ComicArts), a political thriller set in 1917. It’s the forgotten and shocking true story of a group of political cartoonists who were hounded, blacklisted, and put of trial for sedition during an era of violent repression that presages our current climate.
Backderf has won two Eisners, an Inkpot Award, an Angoulême Prize, and a Robert F. Kennedy Award, as well as other library and literary honors.
Derf lives in Cleveland, for reasons he can no longer remember.