I am almost 30, have Asperger’s syndrome, and this is the first time I have read a comic book with an autistic protagonist.
Written by Julie Dachez
Art by Mademoiselle Caroline
In Collaboration With Fabienne Vaslet
Translated by Edward GauvinMarguerite feels awkward and struggles every day to stay productive and keep up appearances. After years of alienation and discomfort, she finally investigates. When Marguerite discovers that she has Aspergers, her life is profoundly changed – for the better.
Published in France in 2016, “Invisible Differences” (“La différence invisible“) tells the story of Marguerite, a young woman working at an office firm, who is hypersensitive to noise, being touched, and strong smells. She and her boyfriend have a fraught relationship because of her social and physical anxiety, and she struggles to understand humor, or to make jokes herself. She loves animals, and doesn’t eat meat, fish or dairy products, as well as gluten, leeks, garlic, or onion.
For some, Marguerite may seem like a terribly monotonous protagonist, but I recognized and sympathized with many of her traits instantly, from the sensitivity to uninvited sounds, smells, and food, to the turmoil interacting with neurotypicals (non-autistic people) can generate, and the odd sensation of feeling adrift and alone even when surrounded by other people. Every conversation feels like a trap: are the people Marguerite talking to making jokes? Did she accidentally say something rude? This ongoing tension becomes the source of many shocking and funny moments.
I was taken aback by how severe Marguerite’s difficulties could be at times, but you can’t criticize them as being an over-the-top exaggeration, because every autistic person is different — and that very much turns out to be the case here, as it turns out she has no idea she has Asperger’s, meaning this is a really eye-opening portrayal of someone who wasn’t diagnosed as a child, and how much they would struggle without a support system being put into place for them. (And to the book’s further credit, it finds time to introduce other autistic people, and show whether they feel happy or upset about their condition.)
This turns out to be a rather political book: yes, everything is political to some degree, but it becomes very apparent that the comic was explicitly designed to raise awareness about autism in France, and there are helpful appendices clarifying just how shockingly behind the country is when it comes to diagnosing, supporting, and understanding autistic children. It’s also gradually revealed this is a veiled autobiography when one of the members of the creative team turns out to be a character in the book, and it becomes clear that many of the ignorant or insensitive comments Marguerite hears after her diagnosis were real, which underscores how jawdroppingly awful people can be about those with autism.
Caroline’s artwork is unique and deceptively simple, vaguely resembling scribbles on a whiteboard: there are no straight lines, in panels or architecture, and the sound effects are often (delightfully) just handwritten words like “blah blah blah,” or “noise noise noise.” The use of color is Caroline’s greatest achievement, perfectly conveying Marguerite’s emotional journey: the book begins monochromatically, relying on black-and-white, shades of gray, and soft blues to build her quiet, solemn and tranquil world, with reds (and sometimes sickly yellows) for anything intruding into it. When life becomes overwhelming for her, the more lurid tones similarly take over the pages, and we experience her discomfort at how intense everything on the pages have become.
After Marguerite realizes she may have Asperger’s and gets diagnosed, something extraordinary happens: a fourth shade of colour, green, appears for the first time. Just as she discovers the cause behind her limitations, and finds ways to cope with them, so too does the artwork start to climb out of the box it was in, shifting from the limited color scheme to a more varied and diverse one: it’s breathtaking, as if you were truly experiencing the world for the first time. (It must be how audiences felt when they first saw the shift from sepia to technicolor in The Wizard of Oz in 1939.) Marguerite’s cheeks literally embody her journey to self-acceptance and happiness as well, going from only being flushed with color when terrified, to becoming rosy all the time.
Overall, “Invisible Differences” is a funny, warm and touching story of self-discovery, and a beautifully rendered one: it’s so stylish, almost every page could be turned into a poster, or the cover of a bag, or a diary or pencil case. Between its subject matter, and its invitingly cartoonish aesthetic, it’s a graphic novel I’d recommend even to those most resistant to picking up a comic. It’s simply a great comedy-drama, and it’ll hopefully start paving the way for more autistic leads in comic books and media that don’t conform to the usual (and often male) savant stereotype.
