I Ate the Whole World to Find You

Rachel Ang is a Naarm/Melbourne writer and artist who makes comics. I Ate the Whole World to Find You is her first graphic novel (or ‘long comic book’), published locally by Scribe, who have published numerous Australian graphic novels in recent years, including those by Sam Wallman, Tommi Parrish, Joshua Santospirito and others – go, Scribe! Ang’s shorter works have been published in The New Yorker and Meanjin, with her chapbook Swimsuit published by the magnificent Melbourne comics publisher Glom Press.

The book design of I Ate the Whole World To Find You takes full advantage of the idea that the life of a comics text begins on the cover – and that image and text jostle over meaning. The cover image introduces the main character, Jenny, spilling a plate of eyeball spaghetti right into our laps. This accident overlaps and upsets the title’s lettering, so that it could be read as ‘I ate the who word to find you’. Jenny stares down at her shadow which reaches in and out of the word ‘you’, and the trailing spaghetti shadows could well be her entrails. Turning to the inside front cover and across the front matter, Jenny stumbles through a strange, David Lynchian kitchen towards her shadow. She is led to the five chapters of ‘comics proper’, which make up the main body of the book.

Each of the chapters is fiercely focused on Jenny’s interiority, even though they start ‘in the world’ – at a workplace, in a pub, on a train, in bedrooms, at the pool, on a childhood family holiday. Each transports us into Jenny’s internal state, hallucinatory and harried and imagistic, and Ang’s pages of drawings swing us swiftly into and out of that dream-picture-language, so that by the last story it’s quite possible that Jenny is giving birth to herself. This possibility is supported by a coda beautifully constructed across the design of the back matter and back cover.