My brother’s keeper.
Autism and learning empathy from a comic book.
Image courtesy of Andrew Seaman on Unsplash.
I remember sneaking into my brother’s room one cold Sunday evening while he’d been sent out by mum. He’d been locked up in there all day, up to something and he wouldn’t let me in. I wanted to know what he was doing. See, my brother lived a far more interesting life than I did. He once caught a frog and kept it for a week before mum found out and completely freaked out (it was a rather large toad, we called him Arnie). So, if he was doing something, it was probably super cool and I was definitely getting in on the action.
After much snooping, I found nothing noisy, stinky, or squirmy- which was disappointing. However, I did find his trusty torchlight and a brown, hard-covered comic book which I promptly nicked and legged it out of his room. And that was how I discovered the comic that changed my life – Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin and Hobbes was initially a newspaper comic strip first published in 1985, authored by the living legend, William Boyd “Bill” Watterson II. The comic ran from 1985 to 1995 and was eventually condensed into a series of paperback books. Which was the form I first encountered them in the early 2000s (yes, boys and girls- I am THAT old!). You can read all about it the author and the production of the comics here and here.
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The comic follows the super exciting life of a 6year old boy called Calvin who lives in an unnamed American suburb, his pet stuffed tiger called Hobbes, and his folks. There are other characters who feature briefly throughout the comics like his arch-nemesis/crush Susie Derkins, Miss Wormwood – his constantly exasperated teacher, his occasional babysitter, and the secondary antagonist and odd-head-shaped bully Moe.
Now to my child-like mind, Calvin was wickedly smart - often saying things that I could not even begin to understand, coming up with stunts that I could never dream up, and conceptualizing his world in a way that always made me ask “Now why didn’t I think about it like that?”. He was unrestricted by acceptable norms, unchecked by polite manners and unhinged in his curiosity, and relentless in challenging the absurd.
Best of all, he had a super cool friend, accomplice, sidekick, and mentor- Hobbes. Hobbes was a pretend stuffed toy who was, in essence, a wise, all-knowing, furry, orange with black-stripes colored Yoda; but with claws and an affinity for milk and tuna sandwiches. In short, Calvin was my brother and Hobbes, well Hobbes was everything that I wanted to be.
What? Tigers are awesome. This is a well-accepted fact.
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Through this comic, I learned new words, reignited my love for the stars, acquired a voracious appetite for obscure knowledge, and finally made peace with being a geek (which back then was akin to having social leprosy). Needless, to say it was exceedingly liberating. The simplistic rationale presented by the comics helped me to form my own philosophy and learn to question everything, regardless of how small or insignificant.
More importantly, Calvin helped me to develop empathy. See my brother is autistic, but we hadn’t figured that out back then. He was obviously different from other kids and sometimes he did things that drove my parents up the wall – refer to the frog incident. He was uninterested in the mundane and unconcerned by the societal norms that mum was constantly trying to instill in us. He did what he wanted when he wanted to and it seemed like he didn’t care what anyone else needed, thought, or felt.
As expected, chaos regularly ensued at chez nous and it was really difficult for me to cope. I was the good kid, who did his chores, rarely got in trouble and basically spent his life over-compensating for his brother. Naturally, he was oblivious of this and generally unfazed by the turmoil he caused while I agonized and tried even harder to keep the peace.
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Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my brother (and still love him) to death – but expending the energy it took to keep the peace was wearing me down and I sometimes couldn’t help but wish that he would just be normal for once. I just wanted a few more peaceful days without the yelling and screaming. Just like Calvin’s mom often did in the comic. But after following Calvin’s adventures through the course of eighteen comic books, I eventually realized that my brother was just a special boy, living in a special world that the rest of us couldn’t see.
Following my sudden flash of insight, the world didn’t magically right itself and the angels didn’t sing in heavenly choirs – there was still loads of screaming, but I was less affected by it. Quietly and without much fanfare, I had made sense of my world. I understood the ununderstandable.
Thanks to one spiky-haired little ruffian and his anthropomorphic tiger.
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