Ant is a current superhero comic series written and drawn by Mario Gully.
Hannah Washington is an 8-year-old African-American girl who gets picked on and ridiculed on a daily basis. To escape this torment, Hannah creates the Ant, an alter-ego derived from stories she wrote in her diary. As her name implies, the Ant is a superheroine who has all the strengths (but none of the weaknesses) of an actual ant.
As time passes and Hannah grows up, however, it's discovered that she actually is the Ant. That, and all the childhood issues she's been dealing with are actually past memories, non-existent... or something like that.
Already somewhat unstable due to being in a mental institution, Hannah chooses to don the mantle of the Ant and discover how she came to pass, as well as taking on some supervillains along the way.
The series received a Reboot in 2021, with Mario Gully handing over art and writing duties to Erik Larsen.
The Ant comics contain examples of:
- Action Girl: Hannah can pack quite the punch, and her Ant abilities make her even tougher.
- All of the Other Reindeer: As a girl, Hannah was bullied by her peers at school. This contributes partially to why she imagined herself as the Ant.
- Animal Motifs: Obviously, Hannah's is the ant. She has Super-Strength (like how an ant can lift three times its weight), can crawl on walls, wears a red suit with antennae, and can "fix" said suit by consuming sugar. Also counts as Animal-Themed Superbeing.
- Clingy Costume: Justified. Hannah's ant costume isn't spandex, but a gathering of nanobots that form to her body, and will simply grow back even when she rips them apart.
- Creepy Good: Ant has quite the scary face and is very ruthless, but is a heroine through and through.
- Crossover: She's teamed up with Savage Dragon and Spawn in the 2021 reboot.
- Enemy Mime: Jessica Mime, who dresses (quite loosely) as a mime and has a sort of "mime power" in the form of gauntlets that allow her to make various shapes in the air out of Hard Light. She's an obnoxious loudmouth even by non-mime standards, though.
- Foil: The Arachnid is this to the Ant. Like the Ant, the Arachnid is a red-skinned superbeing with an insectoid Animal Motif. But the former's a curvaceous superheroine, while the latter's a hideous supervillain.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Hannah has healing abilities thanks to the Ant suit.
- Impossible Hourglass Figure: Adult Hannah, which the artists tend to accentuate with plenty of Boobs-And-Butts Poses.
- Mind Screw: It's unclear whether the Ant is either Hannah's imaginary persona, or an actual person, but the story lends credence to both ideas.
- Ms. Fanservice: Definitely. Hannah covers a lot of the tropes associated with this.
- Wall Crawl: As an ant-themed superhero, Hannah can do this. Plenty of the covers demonstrate this ability of hers.
