From Derf Backderf, the bestselling and award-winning author of My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, comes the “deeply researched and gut-wrenching” (New Yorker) graphic novel chronicling the tragic and unforgettable story of Kent State.

Winner of the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Book
An ALA/YALSA Alex Award Winner for Teen Readers and Adult Books
Winner of the Ringo Award for Best Non-Fiction Comic Work
An ACBD Critics Award winner in France

Named a Best Book by the New York Times, Forbes, NPR, PopMatters, the Beat, and the Comics Journal

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, four students were killed and nine shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, ten-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike.

Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent, as relevant to modern times as it was in 1970.

“One of the masterpieces of the medium...a work of devastating emotional impact.” —Forbes

“Backderf’s masterful Kent State does what really good, in-depth journalism should always do—breathe life into cold, hard facts—but in this case, with searing, memorable images, drawings that put us inside the skin of the protagonists. . . You don’t simply put this book down and get on with your life after reading the final page—you slowly recover, shaken from the experience.” —Bill Griffith, author of Zippy the Pinhead