5 Questions with Rachel Ang
Rachel Ang is an artist and writer working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne, Australia).
Their work has been published by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and kuš! Rachel’s first book Swimsuit was published by Glom Press in 2018, and they were a contributor to the Eisner Award–winning anthology Drawing Power: women’s stories of sexual violence, harassment, and survival in 2019.
Rachel still lives in their hometown, where they draw comics and work in architecture.
In 2018, brought together by their love of comics and hatred of mediocrity, artist Rachel Ang and Liminal editor
Leah Jing McIntosh founded Comic Sans. A serialised anthology for Australian comics artists of colour,
Comic Sans was published in print form from 2018–2019. See past issues here.
Read an excerpt from i ate the whole world to find you here.
(Credit: Tatjana Pitt)
No.1
I Ate the Whole World to Find You is your first full-length graphic collection. We think it’s a long-time coming! When did you first conceptualise it, and what did the writing and illustrating process look like as it evolved over time?
I really love short stories and pitched a collection to Drawn and Quarterly (my publisher), which included a few previously published stories—including ‘Swimsuit’ and the story about the ersatz train running amok. But in adapting and redrawing these stories for the new context of I Ate the Whole World to Find You, I found that these stories shifted and morphed—either by the context of the newer stories, which created all these different shades of meaning and emotional depth to the central character, my evolving drawing style, which feels different to when I first conceived of those stories, or just being in a different season of my life.
For example, the ending of ‘The Passenger’ changed from a pretty dour, mawkish conclusion about unrequited love, to being about Jenny gaining self-knowledge and taking action by fleeing on the back of a giant cat. When I compare the original version of ‘Swimsuit’ (published by Glom Press in 2018) and this new version, they are almost exactly the same, beat-to-beat and panel-to-panel. But I remember my editor commenting that this retelling feels much darker.
While the plot of ‘Swimsuit’ didn’t change, my feelings about the story did—it became about Jenny’s complicity, or her growing knowledge about how hierarchical society is and how it is so imbued with racial violence, but she is unable to speak about it, too self-involved and distracted by her personal problems to notice what’s going on until it’s too late.
The connecting thread of our main character, Jenny, was contained in these older stories, as a kind of cipher for myself. But this book fleshes her out into a character of her own, and follows her through different life stages, from childhood, young adulthood, and impending parenthood. Each story gives us a different lens on recurring themes: growing up with our inner child, memory, sex, the body, labour.
I think that’s what took me so long—figuring out how to draw these stories together, as different interconnected rooms in the same house. And looking from one room to the other, you can see the past or the future.
No.2
In a review for Meanjin, critic Hellai Gul notes that there is a throughline in the book such that it ‘interrogates what it means to inhabit a cis female body’. I agree with her: your protagonist Jenny ruminates through her corporeal existence in sometimes-abject, sometimes-tender ways. Can you speak more to this?
I’m very interested in the space of the body, and the body in space, how we occupy and make space. And because I only have my own life experience and form to draw from, I’m interested in the female body, which is so limitless and strong and gross and kind. I’m also interested in pain, and labour (all kinds, and each story in this collection relates to labour differently, e.g. waged labour, emotional labour, the labour of recalling lost memory, the labour of birth), which seems to be, historically at least, imprinted on the female body. I think, and maybe what you’re getting at, is that the abject and the tender are adjacent. The methods we use to connect and communicate with each other can turn into forms of subjugation or control.
I am also very interested in the relationship between the body and how we learn things. Like, why do I need to learn the same life lesson over and over? We tend to think of learning as something that happens in a pedagogical setting, or something that happens once and then it’s completed; or these days, machine learning—you know, you just press a button and the info is there. But lately I’ve been thinking of cognition as something embodied, and learning as something that is more of a looping, messy, biological process.
No.3
You are also a prose writer. To me, prose is about putting in words the pictures in your mind. When making comics, I imagine that it involves the pictures appearing and relating to the—often short, sometimes poetic—text to create something more for the reader. How do the processes differ for you?
For me, they are related but different processes. Both are about weaving a kind of fabric, whether with just words, or with images and text creating the warp and weft. I am someone who struggles with communication in my own life; I often feel I’m hamstrung by the limits of language. I am driven to make a comic when I find that the appropriate words elude me. In these instances, images appear to me without words. For example, the image of Jenny travelling into the womb to talk to her unborn child, or the train that morphs and explodes: these kind of forms come to me in a subconscious way, and I find myself unable to translate them into text in a way that works, so it’s better to draw. The text often comes after, or simultaneously.
But sometimes prose is more effective. Related to the last question about the body, I think that maybe character, and what I want to achieve on that front, is a big driver when I’m considering whether a story should be in a prose or comics form. In prose, I feel that character is really communicated through tone, the shape and rhythm of the language. In comics, the body and how it’s drawn, how it moves across the page … that’s what forms character.
No.4
Comics and graphic works are finally seeing their moment in mainstream publishing, more so than a few years ago when they were considered more underground—often appearing more within zinemaking culture. You’ve made zines in the past as well. What do you think are the differences between self- publishing and traditional publishing?
Self-publishing is faster and more fun, because you can make a zine overnight and get a dopamine hit at the zine fair the next day. But I always tried to cram so much into my zines, plus I have an annoying perfectionist streak; maybe what I was making started to feel no longer in the punk ethos of zinemaking? Like, is plotting and planning and drawing one thing twenty times and obsessing over minutiae not punk? I don’t know!
Traditional publishing is great because I benefit from a huge amount of feedback, encouragement and mentorship from my editors, and then of course all the machinery of publishing is extremely helpful— distribution, sales, publicity, etc—but the pace is really glacial, so it flattens out any extreme feeling that might have inspired the stories. But I hope that the rawness of the drawings and the messy, unresolved nature of the stories maintains some of the zinester spirit. It took the first-book-pressure off me to think of this book as more of chubby zine or a mixtape.
No.5
What buoyed you you were creating I Ate the Whole World to Find You?
I’m not sure how buoyed I was. I just tried to maintain momentum and not give up. I ended up having a really positive working relationship with my editor, parallel to mine. My partner is a cartoonist as well, so their feedback, enthusiasm and belief in me also kept me moving forwards. It's been a joy to witness their current book project come together, parallel to mine. Comics take a long time, so you need faith and companionship on the journey.
It took me so long to finish this project, that I ended up working on it through some major life events, like getting married and becoming pregnant. I brought every side and season of myself to this work, and I think that shows.
Find Out More
A coworker-turned-prospective-lover confesses a hard-to-swallow fetish. A train ride fantastically goes off the rails. Cousins revisit summer holiday bliss — or was it really horror? Exes fumble an attempt to reconnect over a dip in the pool. And an expectant mother slips into uncharted territory as she enters a communion more pure than language can accommodate.
I Ate the Whole World to Find You maps the topography of trauma, treasures, and loss imposed onto the body of Jenny, a twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something partial hot mess who’s making her way more firmly into adulthood. As she navigates friendship, family, and romantic relationships, will her inability to communicate destroy her, or ultimately be her rebirth?
Set against an exquisitely lush Australian backdrop, Rachel Ang’s pencils are fluid yet scratchy, precise and evocative, bringing to life the inner and external world of Jenny with stunning realism and gushing imagination. Sprinkled with speculative fiction and fantasy, this radiant debut collection establishes Ang as a storyteller of range and power.
Get it from Scribe Publications here.