The richly illustrated and imagined universe of Rachel Ang’s collection of comics I Ate the Whole World to Find You captures the vastness, the intimacy and the strangeness of human feeling. Across five stories, we follow Jenny – her relationships with the people around her, her past and the tensions in her understanding of self.
Ang’s use of light and dark stands out, not only with lush, sprawling settings – like the mottled shadow of a tree in a memory and its enveloping shelter (‘Your Shadow in the Dark’) or the bodies of water that recur as gorgeous, unknowable spaces – but also in the thickness of panel borders shifting as characters navigate their relationships and the black page as the fragile silence of night.
Within this, the body serves as the continuous setting. Adjacent facial expressions that shift from curiosity to apprehension (‘Hunger’), wrinkles on the side of the eyes, hands that flinch and grasp and tug at the air around them, a body lying down and the resounding lub-dub of her heart (‘Your Shadow in the Dark’).
In ‘The Passenger’, blank speech bubbles mark out an overwhelm of hesitations as Jenny struggles to communicate. Darting between moments of fantastical chaos, some panels are cut to stark clarity, while others observe the relationship’s tension outside of the characters’ own bodies.Â
Each story looks on to the next. The tone of ‘Hunger’, the first story, prepares the reader for the fact that this collection will be as strange and confronting as life often is. As we go on, we understand Jenny more deeply – her uncertainties, her fears, her losses. The penultimate comic, ‘Swimsuit’, examines her swelling regret and powerlessness in the face of guilt.
The final story, ‘Purity’, returns to ideas of body, water, language and knowing. Where speech bubbles were empty earlier, here they shatter entirely, as an expectant mother’s external language collapses while she finds communion with her baby. Again, the self can exit the body; she pierces her belly and observes the inside of her pregnant womb. The outside world slips further away, until birth, where she must exit first and show her baby the path forward. An eye. A darkness. An emergence. A resurrection.
Read: Book review: Unsettled, Kate Grenville
This collection makes the surrealities of life palpable. It is an outstanding example of what this expansive form can do.
I Ate the Whole World to Find You, Rachel Ang
Publisher: Scribe
ISBN: 9871761380884
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 316pp
Publication Date: 1 April 2025
RRP $39.99
