i've been drawing gangle for a bit and recently rediscovered she's canonically left handed when making a charm design for her and checking her hand dominance within the series. she's notably shown drawing in Untitled (the entire anime segment), but also draws in The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor (about :30 seconds in).
i am also left handed!
i wanted to do something sorta "big" to close out 2025 with, and i figured a comic would be perfect. i've been thinking a lot about left handed representation in media recently, and gangle is one of only three animation lefties i'm currently aware of (the other two being hiccup from httyd, and gwen stacy from i/atsv). point is that they're very sparse.
i've always seen characters i thought were left handed and got excited, wow, they're like me! only to find out that they're switching hands to please the camera/the crew didn't actively pay attention to what hand they were using. i've said this before when yapping about this topic, but there's nothing wrong with being ambidextrous! in this specific context it's because of technical animation-side reasons that i'm not a big fan of it.
my favorite was kinger before because i liked that he liked bugs (and allusion to him knowing more than he can currently convey), however when i found out gangle was consistently animated left handed my favorite switched immediately. i also love just about everything else about her character, but this sealed the deal for me.
so when i was trying to figure out what to draw for today and wanted something big, the idea struck me -- why not make a comic about her lefthandedness? obviously it doesn't prominently feature as i only focus on her hands in a few panels, but the thoughts that come with it can be directly tied to it. gangle is the only left handed character in the entire circus. that's bound to alienate her mentally, even if this isn't a world where hand dominance really matters (it's a... digital circus, after all...).
"everything's coded a certain way, so why am i different?"
this directly bases itself on right handedness being the norm absolutely everywhere. 10% of the world's population is left handed, which could be equated to effectively a "bug" in the system since we're in a digital land. in real life it's been regarded as something bad and worth punishing a child over. thankfully, i've never had to experience being forced to use my right hand even though everyone in my immediate family are right handed, however it's not stopped me from feeling bad about things that come easy to them and not me because of everything being made for right handed people.
characters like gangle who have this representation mean so much to me because it tells me that the team behind this story sees us. they care enough to make sure hand dominance is consistent and it helps add a meta layer to their character due to the history tied to it.
i wanted to make this comic to explore those feelings and ideas. it's isolating knowing you're the only one different when everyone else is the same. zooble understands gangle in canon, so of course they'd understand gangle here. their struggles aren't the same, but they're close enough that they can understand and empathize with one another. when someone sees you and makes room for you in a world that chokes all of that out, it means more than they'd ever know. lots of my friends who aren't left handed have taken space to understand my point of view, so zooble represents them in this comic.
i also wanted to make my own space to talk about this topic via this comic, because i lowkey always feel like im begging for attention when i bring it up in other spaces. it's a personal thing, but breaking that mentality is important to me. so many of my friends are right handed, and so is most of the world, so this hasn't really been an issue a lot of you guys have ever needed to think about. it's not pressing to have more rep, but it's certainly nice when creators let us know they care about that part of their audience. it's a special kind of connection we're frequently not allowed to have.
if you took the time to read this, thank you. here's to 2026. :]
