By Philip R. Mertz
I've been interested in art for as long as I can remember. As a young child I was very impressed by my uncle Hector's ability to draw. I was amazed by what could be created with simply just pencil, paper, and imagination. In school I was very quiet, but in art class I thrived. Through high school I took as many art classes as I could.
In eleventh grade I created a series of comic books that portrayed myself as a serial killer. In the comics I drew myself killing actual classmates of mine in different ways. Many of the kids I was slaying in the comics were people I didn't even know personally and had never even talked to before. The comics became sort of an underground sensation and I started getting requests from other kids that wanted to have comics made with themselves as the killers mutilating people they didn't like. About twenty issues were made until a teacher confiscated one and got the police involved. This happened the year before the Columbine shootings so I got away with only a school suspension.
After the comics were brought to a halt I became more interested in fine arts and tried to focus more on painting. By my senior year I was concentrating acrylic portraits. I had been distancing myself from others socially and focusing more on my artwork the older I had gotten. Maybe that's why I like painting portraits of serial killers. For the most part they're anti-social except for when they're in pursuit of their next victim. In my late teens I was very withdrawn except for when it came to my art. Killing is the way they communicate and express themselves and I can relate to that. Killing is their art and painting is mine.
I think most people become fascinated with murderers and serial killers because while we all feel like killing somebody every once and a while we don't all act on the impulse. Killers on the other hand have passed that threshold of inhabition and carried-out the act of taking life. At that point they are in complete control of their victim. To be in total control of at least some aspects of our lives is something we all desire.
Editor's note: this is a contributor's statement about his own work, written for Serial Killer Magazine and published as he wrote it, spellings included. It is the companion to the painter Kimba's statement, also in this archive; the two were commissioned as a pair and both artists were asked why they paint killers. The account of the school comics is his own, and no classmate is named in it.