On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. That event has never felt more relevant, with images recalling those moments visible in police opposition to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and more recently, the protests to the war in Gaza on college campuses.
With Kent State so much in the zeitgeist of late, it felt like a good time to talk to Derf Backderf, whose 2020 graphic novel (the aptly titled Kent State) is a methodical recreation of the events big and small that culminated in the massacre.
We met up via Zoom to talk about those moments and their continued significance, the importance of preserving unvarnished history, and the long and varied career that gave him the confidence to take on such a significant subject.
- Jason Bergman
JASON BERMAN: What do I call you? Is Derf your professional name, or..?
DERF BACKDERF: Yeah, and my personal name at this point. My wife has always called me Derf.
I did notice books are copyrighted to, “John Derf Backderf.” Is that your legal name?
Yeah, legal name. The only one who called me John was my mom.
So you've always just been Derf?
Since college, yeah.
Well, the last few weeks have been filled with these images of police confronting protesters, and also the anniversary of Kent State, so it's good that we’re talking today. You've spent far more time on this subject than almost anybody, so I’m curious to know what went through your head when you were seeing these images.
The similarities are chilling. I saw the same thing during the BLM protests, of course. And now the Gaza protests, it's just …dissent in this country is only really accepted when it comes from the right. Public displays of dissent, that is. When it’s from the right, there's all kinds of talk about free speech, and the right to expression, all that stuff. But when it's college students coming from another place, then it's suddenly a threat. And at my alma mater, which is Ohio State, not Kent State, they recently had snipers on the roof of the student union looking down on this group of 50 peaceful protesters. Snipers! It's like, what the fuck? Have we learned nothing here in the 50 years since the Kent State Massacre? Apparently not.
What I found interesting, or maybe not interesting, but somewhat terrifying was, in 1970, the National Guard had to be called in-
Well, they didn't have to be called in. See, that's the key. They were called in.
Right, they were called in. But now in America, we have this over-militarized police force.
Yeah, we don't need the Guard anymore.
We not only don’t need the Guard, I mean, I assume you saw the images of the raid on Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. They pulled up in this, I don't even know what it was. It was like a mechanized bridge?
Like those old siege wagons.
Right, like a siege tower! They pull up and then, of course, they come storming out in full riot gear.
Of course, the police assault on Hamilton Hall back in 1968 was bloodier. They went in with billy clubs swinging and dragged everybody out. But in 1968 and 1970, the cops were really not equipped for crowd control or large protests. That's why the Guard was deployed to campuses in all these different states. Which was ridiculous, because the National Guard in 1970 were combat troops. They were trained for combat, not for crowd control. The only law enforcement that really had crowd control training back then was highway patrols. So what has happened in the 50 years since, is all these local police forces have been militarized and trained to smother protest, and there has been this vast array of crowd-control weaponry invented and deployed for the specific purpose of smothering protest. As depressing as it sounds, that's the real legacy of Kent State. The politicians don't want to send in combat troops and have the situation spiral out of control and have a bunch of protesters gunned down and then have to deal with that blowback. Instead, they want to smack down dissent effectively, and non-lethally.
One of the things you do in the book is you lay out all of the contributing elements to what happened. Why the guardsmen were so on edge. How they had visions of Weathermen and infiltrators everywhere. Like that was kind of the underlying thing. There had to be these outside people who were just there to cause chaos. But at least the Weathermen existed.
Sort of. There were, you know, only about 50 of them left in the entire country by the time Kent State flared up, and they were all in hiding, but yeah, the Weathermen did exist.
They weren't vampire pedophiles out for blood, or Antifa super soldiers.
It’s the same depressing bullshit over and over again. It's just rinse and repeat because it works. Scare the crap out of the rubes and the politicians then get to do whatever they want to do. And we never seem to learn that lesson.
You start Kent State with a couple of pages of you at age 10 seeing National Guardsmen in your hometown. But you don't revisit your childhood at the end of the book. Do you remember what you heard about those events at the time?
Oh, yeah. I was a paperboy in 1970, so I delivered those papers when the news broke. I remember coming home from school on May 4, and I don't think they let us out early, which is kind of surprising. But, you know, it was elementary school, so we got out pretty early anyways, just a couple hours after the massacre. And I got home and the radio was playing. My mom was in the kitchen and she was really upset. But the adults never really talked about these sorts of things, at least my parents didn't. So I had to kind of learn through osmosis. And, you know, it was literally the news spilling out of the TV set, the classic Vietnam-era experience for kids, spilling into your living room, right? And then the paper came out the next day with the stories, and I delivered them around the neighborhood. It was like, wow, that's what those soldiers did? I wasn't really able to process any of this at age 10, but yeah, it left a mark, definitely.
You say in the notes at the end of the book that a poll immediately afterwards showed 58% of Americans blamed the protesters for the shooting. Was that part of what you were absorbing at the time?
You know, there was a lot of yelling, [but] not so much in the news coverage. That tended to be pretty even keeled. Media in 1970 was not like media now, where it's just blasting propaganda from either side and talking heads screaming at each other. And the Akron paper, which we got at home, and I delivered, was a very good paper. It won Pulitzers regularly. It won a Pulitzer for its Kent State coverage, in fact. So it was very measured, but the letters pages were like a Twitter feed. Lots of ranting and crazy conspiracies. And over like the next 10 years, well, even longer, I kept hearing the same kind of arguments, repeated over and over, because the Kent State Massacre is deeply ingrained in this part of the world. Everybody knew somebody who was there, or were there themselves, and the politics of it has never died down. So yeah, I absorbed a lot over time.
What made you want to tell this story? To make this book?
Well, it's always a story that I've carried around with me because of my personal experience. I followed the lawsuits during the ‘70s, I followed later protests, I've been to a number of annual commemorations on campus. What always struck me was that there was no justice. Nobody ever answered for shooting 13 unarmed students and killing four of them. No one. No one went to jail. No one paid any penalty at all outside of some inconvenience about being associated with the massacre. I was always fascinated by that injustice. And, of course, it’s an incredible story, full of drama and tragedy. It's always been on a list of books that I wanted to do. I didn't think I had the drawing ability to tackle it before I did. I needed to get a couple books under my belt before I attempted this one, because it was a tough challenge. It was such a powerful story, that I felt, if I do this, if I don't screw it up, this is going to be a really good book. And that's why I decided to finally do it.
You have children, right?
In college!
What did they learn about Kent State? Is it taught in Ohio? Because I can tell you, I have a teenager taking in AP US History, and there's one line in his textbook. It says there were nationwide protests, four people died at Kent State and two people died at Jackson State. 1
Right.
That's it. There's no context for it either. Just the one line while talking about Vietnam War protests.
Well, I talk to high school students all the time. So there are schools teaching the history, and then teaching this book. That was one of the things that I thought I could contribute, to get a graphic novel in the hands of high school kids, college kids, who don't know the history, and in a format that would appeal to them. And maybe keep this history going, because the students of 1970 are dying off. It's a depressing thought, but that's the way it is, it's the way of the world. Since the book came out a couple of years ago, we've lost a number of the protesters that I interviewed for the book. So once they're gone, I mean, does the history die, too? I don't know, but maybe I can keep it going a year or two longer.
So how did you go about starting the research for a project like this? I mean, you did incredible amounts of research.
Yeah, yeah. Excessive amounts of research. You know, when you live in this part of the world, like I said, you run into people all the time who were there in 1970. And I knew a couple of people who had really been involved. I knew one of the students who was a friend of Jeff Miller,2 he's in the book, and I started with his story, this really compelling story. And I also knew one of the guardsmen. He wasn't a shooter, but he was there. So I started with people I knew and then fanned out from there. I asked them, “Who else can I talk to?” I got some introductions and then I met some other people, and on and on. There were people in comics who were there!3 Some of whom I didn't even know were there. “Oh, yeah, I was at Kent State in 1970.” Really? What’s your story? And one thing led to another. There were 24,000 students on that campus, so there were a lot of people to talk to. I followed leads and kept going. It was an interesting problem because with, say, My Friend Dahmer, there were very few people to talk to. And much of that story was hidden and buried and it was really tough to uncover. With Kent State there was so much material and so many interview possibilities. It was a mountain of material. The challenge was to dig through all this stuff and find what I wanted and needed. So it was a completely different process, but it was fascinating. I enjoyed it.
Did you find people were willing, or eager to talk about what happened?
Some. Particularly with the students of 1970, a lot of them still have PTSD, because they saw their friends gunned down right in front of them. And it was grisly, it was really bloody. So there were some who were very reluctant to talk or would only talk to me briefly, and others who were open and forthcoming. The guardsmen, not at all. They are almost all silent. They’ve remained silent since 1970 and that alone should tell you something right there. Obviously they have secrets to hide. And then there are some of the radical students who are still a bit paranoid, mainly the Weatherman you talked about earlier. I tried to interview a couple who operated at Kent State, although they had dispersed by 1970, since the Weathermen quickly consumed themselves after they rose to power in 1969, but they're still not talking. So it was a mixed bag.
You mentioned the violence of what happened. You really go into detail – like anatomical, exacting detail of what happened to the bodies of everybody who was hurt or killed. Was that important for you?
Yes, very. I knew right from the beginning I was going to depict that, because that's never been shown before. Especially the deadly violence on May 4, which is the day the massacre happened.
During the previous three days of unrest, there’s almost no photo record, because that all took place at night, and the photo technology in 1970 was primitive and it was difficult to shoot at night. So the violence I depict in those chapters has never been visually documented before. And it was very violent. Not deadly, but students got beaten, and hurt, and even bayoneted, and that’s seen for the first time in my book. That’s what this art form can do, create images that have never existed.
Now, there are tons of photos of May 4. It happened in broad daylight. Campus was open, all the students were out. Sunny day, perfect conditions. And there were about a hundred student photographers out on campus photographing all this because Kent State had a good journalism program and a good photography program. So they were all out on campus. And then there were professionals there as well, news photographers and such. On May 4, they're all out there, and we have all of these incredible images, thousands, tens of thousands of images that lead up to the moment when the guard turned and opened fire. There's that iconic image of the Guard shooting down the hill into a crowd of students. But then we have nothing for several minutes, nothing that captures when the bullets actually tore through the crowd and killed the four kids, because those photographers very rightly hit the dirt when the bullets started flying. They were right in the line of fire. In fact, one of them was hit in the chest. He was critically injured while holding his camera. A few minutes later when the gunfire stopped, the photogs all sprang to their feet and they started taking photos again, and we got those very famous photos of the carnage. But we don't have those images of what happened when those bullets actually hit those kids. We’ve never seen how they fell. That's the power of comics. I can create those images based on documentation, based on medical records, and morgue reports, and eyewitness accounts, all of that stuff. I can show exactly what happened to these kids and how they were cut down. And it’s powerful. It’s a gut punch.
And the reason I thought it was important is because there’s a repeating reactionary attitude about protest in this country. That knee jerk attitude of, let’s kill a bunch of them and that will put an end to these protests. We heard that during BLM. We hear it with the Gaza protests. We certainly heard it in 1970 with the Vietnam protests. Let's kill a thousand of them, and the rest will be too scared to cause any more trouble. And that was very much the attitude after the Kent State Massacre. I talked to one person whose parents told him, “We should have shot you all.”
My thinking was, “Okay, if you believe that, here's what it looks like.” Here's what it looks like when those bullets, which were over an inch long, copper-jacketed bullets, go tearing through a parking lot full of 500 students, most of whom were walking to class. They were fired from M1s, which were guns so powerful they could put one of those bullets through a foot-thick tree trunk and still kill the person on the other side. So here's what it looks like. I thought that violence was important to show. The book ends with a wallop. I mean, I pretty much end the story right after the shooting stops. I wanted that to be the walk-off. I wanted the reader to turn that last page, then sit there and go “holy shit.”
As I was working on this, Sandy Scheuer’s sister contacted me. I think it was her daughter or maybe granddaughter who messaged me on her behalf. [Sandy] was one of the four killed. She was a completely innocent bystander, just walking with books in her hand, and they shot her through the jugular. And [Sandy’s sister] had some questions she wanted to ask. She knew I was working on the book, word had gotten around. She had some specific questions she wanted to ask about Sandy's life. I was able to give her some answers, but I told her, “I don't think you want to read this book.” And I explained why. Sandy's death was particularly bloody. I explained to her what I just explained to you, why I did it like this. And she said to me, “Oh, you have to show it. People need to know what was done to her.” So that was confirmation that I was on the right track.
Yeah, like I said, there's this one line in my teenager's history book, and it's a very sanitized version of history.
Right.
Your book is not sanitized.
No, no, it's the unvarnished reality of what happened.
You went to Ohio State on a journalism scholarship, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Was your goal at that time political cartooning or were you thinking of going into reporting?
My goal was to go into newspapers. I mean, political cartooning was a pretty hard career to break into. At that time there were maybe like 300 staff political cartoonists in the country. But I thought I'd do something with newspaper comics, you know, maybe a comic strip. I got into political cartooning in college and I really enjoyed it at that time, and I thought, well, I'll give it a go, despite the odds. I could also write and I could copy edit. I figured I could get a job doing something at a newspaper and maybe, you know, worm my way into a cartooning job, which is exactly what I did. I actually pulled it off for a while. I was on staff as a political cartoonist, with a salary and everything. But then I quickly tired of the constraints of the whole thing. Newspapers were becoming more and more corporate, you know, and I was becoming more and more counterculture, which was not particularly appreciated at a daily newspaper. You had to be a slightly left-leaning Republican to be a mainstream political cartoonist. Pro-business, definitely. That was the preference. It was not a good fit for me. But it was fun while it lasted, and then I found other daily newspaper jobs for a while, because I enjoyed working at a newspaper and I made good money, and then decided to make my move and do the cartoons I wanted.
How did you stumble into The City then?
After I stopped political cartooning, I was trying to figure out what to do next. That's when the alt-weeklies were really starting to rise up. I was in Cleveland by that point, I was working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as an artist/designer and staff cartoonist while I tried to figure out what to do next. I started reading the local weekly paper and I was blown away by comics like Life in Hell, Lynda Barry, a few others, and I thought, man, I could do something like this. So I developed this freeform comic strip, which were the observations of a 20-something hipster walking around a big city. And I sold it. It worked. I made a living with that thing for 20 years. Kind of crazy.
It ran for 24 years!
Right.
That's a longer run than Calvin and Hobbes!4
Yeah, but 24 years was too long. I should have shut that thing down after the Nineties.
At its height you were in 140 papers.
Yeah. I made money with it up till the end, when I finally pulled the plug. Weeklies were swirling the drain at that point. There were periods of the strip that I really liked, especially early on. Finding your voice, really finding your voice for that first time, it's exhilarating. I was having a blast with it, and people were responding to my work in a big way for the first time, too. Well, in college they did, but as a professional, [this was] the first time. And I was digging it, man. It was a great period, the early ‘90s, there was a lot of fun stuff happening in media and culture, particularly pop culture and comics. It was an incredible era. But you know, that alt-weekly newspaper business, oh, my god. They quickly blew it, and it got pretty frustrating by the late ‘90s. I should have shut it down after 10 years and moved on to books, because I'm much better at books than I ever was at a comic strip. It was a good comic strip, maybe even borderline excellent for short periods of time, but I never really grabbed hold of people like, say, Matt Groening or Lynda Barry did. I mean, that's a pretty high standard, I admit. But you know, that's what we all aspire to. I was missing some element there.
I’m curious, because you were there at the absolute zenith of the alt weekly newspaper business, when they were reaching an audience that seems almost incomprehensible today. What were your big frustrations?
When I started the strip in 1990, alt-weeklies embraced comics. They ran lots of them, and they printed them large and gave them great display. I think, as a whole, they were the best comics being produced at that time. Most of the A-listers now started in weeklies; Ware, Burns, Bechdel, Katchor, on and on. A few years later, that changed completely. Alt-weeklies ran fewer and fewer comics. There was a lot of turnover in the business, because these papers never paid well, and talented people naturally moved on. The visionary iconoclasts who built these papers and made them so interesting, and loved comics and understood their value, were replaced by dull business types, who didn’t. It was pretty aggravating. Now I look back and understand that everything has its time, and the era of the alt-weekly was over by 2000.
Did you really wander around Cleveland looking for weirdos?
Sure. They’re everywhere. The bus was a great place to find them. Or the train, or at a couple of coffee shops that were really popular with weirdos, the library. Downtown Cleveland was fertile ground. Then it all changed and people began staring at their phones with their mouths open. Once that happened, that cartoon material dried up. I'm sure they were still being weird online, but they weren't being weird in public. It was kind of a bummer.
So how did that lead to your first book, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks?
I started working on short stories in the mid ‘90s for laughs, just for something different, to see if I could make anything out of them, or if there was any hope there. And I put out a couple floppies in the early Aughts. One was a little My Friend Dahmer collection, short stories I’d made over several years. And another was a Trashed collection, which I would also later turn into a full book. And both of those floppies got nominated for Eisners. So, you know, I was like, hmm, maybe I should try some more of this. So after some farting around – I also got cancer, which slowed me down for several years – I decided I was going to sit down and produce a book. And that became Punk Rock and Trailer Parks. I wanted to get a book under my belt. I didn't want to do My Friend Dahmer first, which I had in my back pocket, because I didn't think I was ready to tackle it. So I needed to do another book first. A fun story, with fun characters. And you know, if I blow it, no one will care. And I can learn from it and then move on to the more important book. But people liked it. So I knew I was on the right track.
Where did the character The Baron come from?
I don't know. He just came to me. He materialized one day. He's a great character. I really had a lot of fun with him.
Well, we saw him go from being this super awkward teenage outcast to finding his people and being torn out of his comfort zone. It's a very relatable story.
Yeah, exactly. Well, it was my story too. That's the power of the counterculture. Specifically in this case it’s the power of music and the music scene. We've all experienced that at one point or another. You find your legs and you find your people. You find a place where you fit in.
Have you ever thought about revisiting him?
Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to. But I've got to do some other stuff first.
So Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, that gave you the confidence then to do My Friend Dahmer?
Yeah. I'd been working on Dahmer off and on since the mid ‘90s. The first My Friend Dahmer story was published [by] Kim Thompson in Zero Zero, then I did the floppy. I was trying to get my head around the story, and figure out how to do it. It took a long time. And then after Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, I had some more fun with cancer, because the radiation damage really fucked me up. So they had to go in and fix all that shit. Open heart surgery. So at that point, I figured, if I'm going to do this book, I better get to it, because I don't know how much longer I have. I don't want to sound morbid, but you know, my track record was not good at that point. So I sat on my couch with a lapboard and drew the book. I couldn't even walk up and down the steps, but I could sit there and I could draw pages. And I had done so much work at that point. All that was left to do was draw it. So I sat there for the next six, seven months while recovering and finished My Friend Dahmer. It sounds really like a creepy type of thing to do when you're recovering from a life threatening illness, but it worked! I like making comics and it's fun for me to do that. It brought me back, the restorative power of comics. It was a big part of my recovery. And what came out of it was life changing.
When you started putting together that book, how did you crack that story? Because what I love about My Friend Dahmer is that it's not the story people were expecting. It's not the story of Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer. That story is certainly out there, but that's not the story you're telling. You're telling a very personal story about a human being, who just happens after the last page, to become Jeffrey Dahmer.
Become a monster, yeah. The kid who falls between the cracks.
So how did you crack that story?
Well, I mean, it took 19 years to finish. It was years of just thinking about it and pondering, how did this happen? How was this allowed to happen? Why were so many mistakes made? Why didn't anybody ever intercede? Why? My Friend Dahmer essentially is a story about failure. Everybody fails. The teachers, his parents, his friends, school administrators, the cops, neighbors, everybody. Jeff himself fails, spectacularly. And the result is a pile of bodies. How many times have we seen this repeated over and over again in society? I don't pretend to have any answers. I simply recounted what I saw. I thought it would be a powerful story, and a really unique perspective. It was a total stroke of – I don't want to use the word luck, but I will in this instance – because it just dropped from the sky and landed in my lap. Nobody else had this story. And I was uniquely positioned to tell it, because I was a part of it. So I set out very methodically to do that. Luckily I had that journalism background, so I knew how to research a story. And I was also an insider. I was a local boy, so people would talk to me, friends would talk to me, people who would never talk to mainstream media. So it was just pure dumb luck that I was able to do this. The challenge was not to blow it.
You had to do all this research about your hometown. How did you go about doing that?
You mean the visual research?
Any of it! You talked to your classmates about what had to be a very difficult subject.
Yeah, but you know, we were all in the middle of it, so we wanted to talk to each other, because no one else could understand what we were going through.
Here's how surreal this all got. And my definition of surreal is probably a lot higher than yours because of this Dahmer experience. About a week into it, after Dahmer was arrested, the national media swarmed my hometown. It was a viral story. This is before viral, but it was as viral as it got back then. Dahmer's boyhood home is on a country road. Five miles in either direction were media trucks. Five miles, so 10 miles total. Hundreds of media here. Dahmer’s property was ringed off with police tape as investigators went over the grounds looking for bones, fragments of his first victim. The biggest bone they found, and they only found, I think, about a hundred, the biggest one was half-an-inch big. Dahmer had just turned this kid into powder back in 1978. So they're doing that. There's this huge crowd of media. Across the street from Dahmer's house, two little neighbor girls set up a lemonade stand to take advantage of this unusual crowd. While across the street, they're sifting for bones.
Maybe a week or two into this, I got together with a couple of my high school friends, because we were all experiencing the same thing. We're all under assault, because the media quickly zeroed in on us. So they’re calling, the phone is ringing off the hook. Reporters are camped out in front of my house. I met these two friends at one of their houses. He actually lived just down the street from Dahmer's house in my hometown. Just to talk it all over. If that media had known we were there, they would have torn us to shreds. We just sat around for a couple hours and shared stories, and I heard things I'd never heard before. Because what happened in 1991 when Dahmer was caught was, just like that, my entire personal history was rewritten. All these goofy tales of high school became much more sinister. All the stuff we did as teenagers – silly, inappropriate, stupid stuff – now it suddenly became something completely different, because it was like, holy shit, that's what he was thinking when we were doing these things?
It was an alienating feeling to have your life flipped upside down like that and have everything redefined. So we shared stories that we hadn't told each other before, because they didn't have a point before that. They were random, whatever. Now they all had a point. I had a sketchbook with me, and I wrote it all down. There's about 75% of the book in that sketchbook from that afternoon, mostly the stories that we shared. The challenge then was to figure out a timeline, to get it all in order, to complement it with other stuff that happened. And there wasn't a lot of documentation, because it was mostly Jeff by himself or Jeff with one or two other people. It was tough. The rest of it took a long time, but most of the book comes from sharing stories with my friends.
It seems like it would be extra specially surreal for you then when a movie is made based on it.
Yeah, that was really, that was kind of a mind blower. They filmed it in my hometown.
They filmed it at his house, on the property, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Were you at all involved in any of that?
I was on set a couple times. But I didn't really want to be involved, because I was working on another book at that point. I think I was about to leave for a European tour too.
These past two weeks, there's a documentary crew from France that's been here doing – God bless the French – an hour long documentary on the making of My Friend Dahmer, the book. It's for Arte TV, which is a PBS-like arts channel. They've been filming in Dahmer's house, too, so I've been back there again. They actually had me drive around town because they want to have some visuals when I'm doing some narration. They somehow found a 1978 AMC Pacer, which is the car I give Dahmer in the book, only because I wanted to draw a Pacer, because it's such a ridiculous car. They had me driving around town while talking about My Friend Dahmer. The surrealism never ends.
I do lots of research for these interviews, but there are some parts of the internet that I prefer not to go into.
Oh yeah, I know which ones you're talking about.
Are you considered like a Dahmer authority now? Does that freak you out?
I'm a Dahmer authority, sure, but I don't really respond to any queries. I don't take part in any of the junk documentaries or something like the Netflix series or any of that stuff. I always say no. I don't engage online. I wanted to tell my story. I did. If you want to read about all that I know, it's in My Friend Dahmer. I'm not really interested in engaging with Dahmer fans – quote unquote, "fans." They are out there. Most of them are young women for some reason. It's really bizarre.
Like I said, there's a point at which my research stops. Where I just don't want to know anymore.
[Laughs]. Well, now you have the factoid that there are Dahmer fans to add to your list. You can spot them a mile away. Dahmer fans have a certain way of approaching me and it's immediately … block. I’ve stepped back a lot from social media anyways. I got off Twitter. The Dahmer fans have trouble reaching me, but some still manage to find me.
After My Friend Dahmer, but before Kent State, you brought the expanded Trashed out. How close to your life was that book?
All the episodes on the truck, those all actually happened. That's all real. The rest of it is fictionalized, but the experience, absolutely. That's 100% true. That's what it's like. The only thing that's missing is the smell. I told my publisher we should have made it a scratch-and-sniff book, but I don't think the booksellers would have appreciated that. [Laughs].
You worked on a garbage truck for two years?
A year total. Split. The last three months were a full school year after the first stint, so spread across two years.
Did that experience have a lasting impact on you?
Yeah, sure. It's almost a hopeless quest now to cut down on garbage, but I'm really anal retentive about it. I try to keep the weekly trash as small as I can. I'm constantly yelling at my wife and kids about throwing away too much stuff. The non-recyclable trash has expanded to a mind-boggling degree. The war is lost at this point. I read an article today that said all males on the planet have microplastics in our testicles! When you think about it, plastics really only started getting widespread use in the 1950s. So in 75 years, we have filled the world– and everyone's balls– with plastic. In 75 years! It's amazing.
You've got those sections of the book, the data sections where you just have facts. Those are probably out of date by now.
Oh, yeah. Trashed was published in 2016, and it was out of date two years later, mainly because the recycling system completely collapsed. The Chinese pulled out, because we were sending them too much shit, very poor-quality, raw recyclable material. They couldn't use it, and they were taking 90% of our raw recycling at that point. So all those recycling figures that I had in the book, scratch those now. Everything goes to the landfill these days. They pick up your recycling bin, sure, but they likely throw it into the truck, and cart it off to the landfill. They're not recycling any of it. It's gotten much, much worse.
All of the books we've talked about take place in a fairly small geographic area.
I know that. Yeah, I know that. I was giving an interview in, I think it was the Netherlands. It might have been Belgium, might have been Flanders, but the guy was speaking Dutch. The publication came out and I read it. It was a good interview. He said, "Derf’s entire body of work is set within a 20-mile radius of the house he grew up in." I was like, "Holy shit, is that true?" I thought about it and it's like, yeah, I guess that is true.
Do you still live in the same general area?
I live in Cleveland, so in the city, not a small town like I grew up in. But yeah, still Ohio.
It's a lesson. To find a good story, just look out your window. You don't have to travel to do it. But on the other hand, I don’t want to limit myself. I'm actually working on a book now that's set somewhere else.
That was actually going to be my next question.
Yeah, just to change it up a little. That 20-mile-radius thing was kind of a mind-blower.
Is that intimidating in some way, having to step outside that 20-mile radius?
No, not really. I mean, all the books I made are challenging in one way or another. Trashed was probably the easiest, actually, because it was a fun book. I was just recounting these funny stories. The research wasn't hard because I really only had two semi or tri-annual studies that document our garbage production and disposal. All the other figures about trash are covered up by the government. Some states won't even report their garbage collection. Not surprisingly, they're mostly red states. Texas, for example, won't even tell you how many garbage dumps they have. Why is this information secret? Well, because the government doesn't want the public to know. Even though that knowledge would be a good thing, because maybe we could start to change our behavior. But now our garbage crisis is unseen, growing secretly out there in the boonies. For example, when you're driving down the highway and you see a semi-truck go by that has no markings, odds are, high odds, that the trailer is full of trash. It's heading to some far-flung garbage dump because they've moved all the landfills way out into the boonies. They have these collection centers now in populated areas. Local garbage trucks dump their loads into trailers, and then they truck the garbage 100 miles out to the hinterlands. And then there's a big contraption called a tipper, which actually takes the trailer and tips it way up and dumps the shit all into a massive landfill, one trailer after another. The landfills are bigger now than ever. It's like we're driving down the highway surrounded by our own shit, essentially.
Is that next book going to be fiction or nonfiction?
It's historical fiction.
Similar to Trashed or..?
Yeah, but it's a different time period. It hasn't been announced yet, so I'm not permitted to talk about it. But it's challenging. It's really kicking my ass right now. But I always have that point in books where they're just like, oh god, there's no hope. And somehow it works out. So we'll see what happens. [Laughs].
The post ‘What always struck me was that there was no justice’: An Interview with Derf Backderf on the state of campus policing appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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