We’ve just posted a long interview with Derf focusing on his recent graphic novel Punk Rock and Trailer Parks from SLG Publishing. The topics also include his award-winning comic strip The City and his prior graphic novels, Trashed and My Friend Dahmer.

Derf’s new graphic novel includes cameos by many legends of punk rock, including the Ramones, Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, Klaus Nomi, and Joe Strummer of the Clash. “I was two-thirds of the way into it when I noticed that all the people I had chosen were, in fact, no longer with us,” Derf says in the interview. “So I decided to only use deceased rock stars, partly out of fun and partly to, in some small way, honor them and what they meant to me.”

Derf talks about his start as an editorial cartoonist. It went great until a new editor came on board and, “I was fired, for, as he put it, ‘general tastelessness.’ Bit of a blow at the time, later a badge of honor.”

The cartoonist also happened to be a high school classmate of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was the subject of his first graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer. “The whole point of My Friend Dahmer is that people think of Dahmer or think of Hitler, Mengele, or Osama bin Laden, and they seem like absolute evil. But, you know, they were all kids once. They weren’t always evil,” he says.

You can read the whole interview here.