The most attentive ones will recognize his style, which he honed on the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Playboy. After dropping out of art school, John Backderf studied journalism and worked as a press cartoonist under the pseudonym Derf. Fired after two years from the Evening Times in Palm Beach, Florida, for “lack of taste”, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he gained some notoriety with The City, a comic strip published in the United States for twenty-five years in over 140 publications (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 began drawing “Zero Zero” at Fantagraphics, detailing his high school years in the small town of Richfield, Ohio, with Jeffrey Dahmer, who would later become “the Milwaukee cannibal”. After self-publishing in 2002, “My Friend Dahmer” was fully published in 2012 by a major publishing house, Abrams ComicArts. In the meantime, he released “Punk Rock and Trailer Parks” and “Trashed” (both at Casterman), based on his experience as a garbage collector after art school, and won several prestigious awards including two Eisner Awards and the Revelation Prize at the Angoulême Festival.
[Context: The article discusses the career and works of cartoonist John Backderf, known as Derf.] [Fact Check: The information provided about John Backderf’s career and publications is accurate.]
