Ant #1 // Review
Mario Gully came up with the idea for a superhero when he was in jail. Some time later, that character had managed to make it into a few Image Comics. Gully offered superhero comics veteran Erik Larsen the opportunity to buy her. He did. Now, sometime later, Larsen dusts the character off and takes a fresh look at her in Ant #1. Acting as Writer/Artist/Colorist, Larsen re-introduces them with a simple origin story that has a Ditko-esque simplicity about it and a style straight out of the dawn of the Silver Age. It’s the end of 2021. Welcome to the early 1960s.
She was a girl sketching in her living room when her dad asked her what she was drawing. It was a powerful costume of shiny red that made her indestructible...and it allowed her to help other people who weren’t so well-protected. Her dad was involved in advanced science. It was the kind of project that made him enemies. Before he died, he had injected her with the project through a single syringe. Now she’s precisely the hero that she always imagined she would be as a kid. Now she’s Ant.
Larsen has the style, poise, and pacing of a classic Silver Age superhero origin down perfectly. Drawn from the initial inspiration of Gully, Larsen gives a little girl a cleanly-paced backstory that’s drawn from quite a few different heroes at once. There’s a little Captain America. There’s a little Iron Man. There’s a little Spider-Man. It’s fun. Nothing in it is terribly original, but it’s fun to see the standard superhero origin story playing o
ut in an appealingly rendered African-American girl named Hannah Washington. As the story opens, she doesn’t know what’s happened to her. She’s about to find out.
Larsen’s art style has never been anything other than appealingly crude. That hasn’t stopped him from being one of the most prolific comics creators of the past thirty years. The rubbery, repurposed Ditko style continues to work in a way that even Ditko never managed later on in his career. Somehow Larsen’s many, many issues of The Savage Dragon managed to find a niche for the awkward amplified crudeness of action, perspective and anatomy feels right at home in a whole new series. Larsen’s well aware of it and works with the style right down to every last detail from the narration to the banners on the front cover.
Silver Age-style heroism still works in Larsen’s hands, but it’ll be interesting to see where Larsen takes it this time. It’s kind of weird seeing something done in the format of an old comic that wouldn’t have looked out of place decades ago that has the occasional flash of a modern comic. (The stars in the night sky in the first couple of pages are kind of disorienting. As is the rich sheen that Larsen has managed to render on the surface of the hero’s costume.) The ground that he’s covering here with Ant has been so heavily covered in the course of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. An origin story is all well and good, but it’s going to be challenging to keep moving with it if he doesn’t find some way to inject new life into an old superhero format.
