On Wholesomeness (and alligators)
What is it about Singaporean illustrator Chow Hon Lam’s Buddy Gator comics that captures audiences worldwide? Shortly after starting Buddy Gator in June of 2020, Lam described the Buddy Gator series as “comics about a wholesome alligator to spread some positive vibes.” In everyday language, the term “wholesome”—as in ‘wholesome’ content—is often equated with the term “family-friendly” to mean appropriate for young children and their emotional, moral, and mental development. Yet the obvious reality for many LGBTQIA+ people is that our own family environments were far from ‘wholesome’, even hostile to our development as the people we are becoming. Nevertheless, the need for developing and cultivating our personage remains—unattended.
In this essay, I want to suggest that breaking the link between “wholesomeness” and “family” offers a more robust understanding of these two terms and how each of them spill into the realm of friendship. While wholesomeness can indeed be considered a staple characteristic of an ideal family environment, I argue that its full potential is better articulated as an aesthetic and ethical aspiration, that is, wholesomeness as a mode of relating. Buddy Gator visualizes this broader sense of wholesomeness, and interestingly for the purposes of this essay, does so primarily under the sign of “friendship” rather than “family.”
Consider the connected pieces “No Worries” and “Friendship.” In the first panel of the former, Dennis the hedgehog looks mournfully towards Gator the alligator saying “I burst my balloon again,” the remnants of Dennis’ balloon on the ground between them. In the second panel, Gator, holding two balloons, gives one to Dennis, and one of the turtle twins passing by gives their shell to Dennis as a spike-covering hat, assuring Dennis: “No worries, you won’t burst the balloon anymore.” In the follow-up piece “Friendship,” Gator passes by Dennis and sees that Dennis has once again popped a balloon. Gator inquires: “Oh no, your spikes burst the balloon again? Where is your hat?” In the second panel, a sad Dennis turns around and gleefully points to a cactus, Rony, who is now wearing the turtle shell hat and holding a balloon. “Rony needs that hat,” Dennis replies with a smile.
Dennis’ arc across these two pieces suggest how kindness and accommodation reaches beyond the specific relationships involved. Dennis, who has been changed by the loving concern and thoughtful solution by one of the turtle twins for the spike-and-balloons problem in “No Worries,” cannot help but pass on that same concern and thoughtfulness to Rony the cactus in “Friendship.” Much in the same way that an ideal family environment serves as a space where healthy relations with others are modeled so that one may then go out into the world and relate beyond the family unit, friendship and kindness propel Dennis into further loving relations with others.
The line between “friendship” and “family” is often blurred with invocations to Kath Weston’s notion of “chosen family,” a term that has had immense staying power within LGBTQIA+ circles. For those of us who are unable to receive the support and care that our flourishing requires from our immediate family, or perhaps are outright rejected by our biological kin, our chosen families often become the space and context where, like the turtle twin and Dennis, we are able to manifest ourselves in ways that facilitate the development of others (and vice versa). Indeed, one disidentificatory reading of the Buddy Gator series (since the series is of course unapologetically heteronormative) could consider it as a chosen family portrait of Gator and friends. Or perhaps more to the point, Buddy Gator offers a kind of imaginal space where the wholesomeness absent in one’s actual family can be visually rehabilitated through bending apple trees, ice cream time, and group photos.
Cuteness aside, Buddy Gator offers an extended meditation on wholesomeness as a condition of being and practice of relating that tends to the possibility of everyone being able to manifest their unique personage in a way that amplifies the capacity of others to do the same. Indeed, one could say that the main message of Buddy Gator is that each person is special in their own way and that we should find creative ways of relating to others in celebration of specificity and difference. This ethic saturates the entire series first and foremost more so than the occasional singe of heteronormativity. To recognize Buddy Gator as wholesome suggests that we can and perhaps already are finding ways to relate to each other that facilitate each of our ownmost becoming, regardless of whether or not our immediate family upbringing allowed for this development. Thankfully, family does not have a monopoly on wholesomeness. Instead, wholesomeness, as an aesthetic and ethics of relation, simultaneously provides a normative rendering of what family should be while vastly exceeding this image, spilling out into a broader expanse of what right relations could and should be.
