A new collection of graphic short stories, out now (April 2025) from Drawn and Quarterly/Scribe Publications.

An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship… unless it gets inside.

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 routing 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? 

A coworker-turned-prospective-lover confesses a hard-to-swallow fetish. A train ride fantastically goes off the rails as old habits get dragged across the tracks. Cousins revisit summer holiday bliss—or was it really horror? Exes fumble an attempt to reconnect over a dip in the pool on a squelching summer day. And an expectant mother slips into an unusual place as she embarks on a communion with her baby more pure than language can accommodate. 

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, Ang’s radiant debut collection introduces a dynamic voice to comics, and establishes Ang as one of the most exciting short-story writers working in comics today.

Published globally by Drawn and Quarterly.

Published by Scribe Publications in Australia and Aotearoa.

Endorsements and early reviews:

Here are stories of the body’s darkest moments and profoundest ecstasies, bound up in a lush, strange, genre-defying collection. I adored this book.’
Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

Rachel Ang’s I Ate the Whole World to Find You combines my two favourite flavours: strange and evocative. They draw a beautifully reverberating world that transcends language so that we can see the splendour of it all anew. This collection is a hallucination, a holy text, an experience to return to again and again.
Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

I Ate the Whole World to Find You is a mesmerising collection of dancing lights and shadows, sometimes perplexing and unsettling, always beautiful. Their characters navigate attraction, old hurts, and the eternal dilemma of having a body — ushered with the utmost care by Rachel Ang’s gestural, sensual cartooning.
Lee Lai, author of Stone Fruit

Rachel Ang’s graphic novel is made to be devoured. Blood-pumping and fresh … A bold, hallucinogenic collection that feels uncomfortably human.
Claire Cao, The Guardian

Ang conveys Jenny’s brooding nature, bodily discomfort, and veiled desires through believably messy slices of life. This poignant work will appeal to fans of Megan Kelso’s comics and Nicole Holofcener’s films.
Publishers Weekly

Compelling … Ang's narrative is textually minimal. Their expressive art builds layers of meaning not reliant on extensive words … Step-by-step, panel-by-panel, amid complications and challenges, Ang enables Jenny to painfully, tenaciously, figure out her own self.
Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

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 … Ang’s use of light and dark stands out, not only with lush, sprawling settings but also in the thickness of panel borders shifting as characters navigate their relationships and the black page as the fragile silence of night … This collection makes the surrealities of life palpable. It is an outstanding example of what this expansive form can do.
Munira Tabassum Ahmed, ArtsHub

A visual essay, about the body in space/space in the body, originally written for the Wheeler Centre. Big thanks and respect to Jon Tjhia.

2019

Published in literary journal Going Down Swinging, Issue 40. A version of this story was read by Rachel and produced by Zacha Rosen for a podcast called Or It Didn’t Happen, broadcast on FBI Radio Sydney.

Dream Diary is an ongoing comic which blends magic realism and autofiction.

I was commissioned to create weekly “Well-being Wednesday” comics for Mod Museum at University of South Australia.

I designed the visual identity for Mapping Melbourne, a festival by Multicultural Arts Victoria. Designed to work across print, web, mobile, textiles, ticketing and other applications, the identity is made up of a cast of characters who work together in a tableau, but are dynamic and have plenty of personality on their own.

Excerpt of graphic essay originally published in World Literature Today, Spring 2020 issue. Read the rest at their website.

Contains a quote from "Beautiful Dress", written by Marlon Williams (Native Tongue Music Publishing Pty Ltd) . Lyrics reproduced with permission

Rachel’s first book, Swimsuit, was published in 2018 by local micropress Glom Press.

“Rachel Ang’s Swimsuit is sensitive and subtle and little bit devastating. The tender attention she gives to her details— the shadow of a lamp post, a glance, or a pregnant pause— illustrates a brief but rich encounter that should be read multiple times.”

-LEE LAI

"There's a space between the last thing we said and the next thing we're going to say... This comic, like the best short fiction, draws our attention to that place. "

PAT GRANT

Available from Glom Press and good book stores including Readings, Brunswick Bound and the Paperback Bookshop.

Short comic drawn for The Lily, a Women’s Issues section of The Washington Post.