Ant by Mario Gully and Marc Hammond

I am so fascinated by superheroines right now that I can’t tell if I’m a queer or a gay man. When I discovered the cover of Ant by Mario Gully and Marc Hammond, my way was => cheerfulness of the brain ah cool indie comic book => Heart weariness oh no it's another superhero thing => joy of the underwear woh damn did you see that kolossaal ball ?! Now let's see if the work has more to offer than just an improbable buttock.

Synopsis

Hannah Washington is looking for her lost memories and would like answers to her questions. She woke up in an asylum, but what happened before ? Is she Ant or is it a figment of her imagination ?

Review

From an independent comic book, one expects a break – aesthetic, narrative, moral, in the ideal all at once – as for the often mind-numbing immensity of mainstream comics. In the aforementioned area – the exposure of the superheroine’s body – Gully does make a different proposal. Never will we see, in the official publications, Wonder Woman (for example) so explicitly drawn for the eye rinse. DC comics executives know that a good portion of the readership buys its Wonder Woman because he dreams of being lassoed, tied up and tortured in face-sitting you can’t breathe I’m choking I’m sorry. They know it and display it with a cheerful cynicism in books such as Cover Girls (Louise Simonson, 2013).

However, the DC dirlos don’t allow themselves the unbridled SM delirium, notably by concern of the small readers. Wonder Woman and her friends remain chaste. Its roughly realistic proportions.

Its warrior attitudes. Free close-ups avoided most of the time. Next to that, Ant takes porn star poses. On the cover, here on the left, we have a classic face down ass up arms crossed with cam look. A little further down, you can see another classic: from the back, with the look over the shoulder and the hand that seemingly caresses the buttocks.

This pornographic imagery is not limited to the covers, which by advertising calculation tend to exacerbate the most animal aspects of the works (destruction ass twist). Within the book itself, Hannah or her alter-ego Ant is constantly in suggestive postures, whether she is walking down the street, falling asleep in bed, investigating in a bookstore to fill in the holes in her amnesia, or fighting monsters. Gully seems to appreciate especially, during the fights, the double jumping kick attack, drawn in low angle, Ant in reverse amazon, big gap in the air.

Gully's erotic whims are accurate. Niche fetishism, if you consider that all the poses described are topped with a giant ant’s head. At times, this gives the impression of reading not so much super-heroic adventures as a lewd collection, as that little pervert Crumb can offer when he details his adoration of large, very muscular chicks. But Gully doesn’t dig, he just moves the cursor between what DC comics allow and what they don’t allow yet. He doesn’t assume the inclination to the end – or he is not allowed to assume.

From what I read, Gully tried to go further in his fantasies but he had to play with his elbows like no other, and often gave up. With the release of the issue 8 of Ant, he gets burned for a scene where a stripper reveals her buttocks. In 2014, the adventures of Ant are definitively stopped because the new writer, Erik Larsen, refused that – all this is authentic – Ant attacks a villain by pressing his vulva against his face, the villain counterattacking with his tongue. The adventures of Ant contained in this publication, never translated into French until now, date from 2005.

Hopefully, Mario Gully has since come to realize his strengths and has emancipated himself from bad advisors.

Pbecause once its erotic potential is set aside, Ant is not far from having no interest. The story consists of a variation on the amnesiac superman motif (at the same time the Jason Bourne saga was killing it at the box office). It’s not a bad strategy given the editorial conditions: in 2005, Gully has already released 4 issues of Ant at Arcana Studios – small success – and he sells his character to Image Comics; for them, he has to invent a new beginning for the series. The amnesia of the character allows to put in narrative the rediscovery of the universe and to welcome in the Ant Image Comics version as well as the old and new readers. But concretely, it gives an album where the heroine spends 90% of her time monologuing internally, writing zero : “I am looking for answers to my questions.

What happened to me?  What has been done to my mind to make all my memories so fuzzy? ? And why does this image haunt me ?”, “My heart is racing when I see the picture. My father. The one I wanted to be a heroine for.” When Gully tries to refine his dialogues and concoct fights full of typical punchlines Spider-man, is clumsy: “Arachnid wants to know if Ant has as nice a red inside as outside.

Arachnid will soon know. Ant wonders if Arachnid is as stupid as he is ugly.” The drawing and the cutting, which manage to be classic year after year, are not carried by any breath and seem cheap. In short, as soon as Gully tries to compete with mainstream comics in the classic action genre, it fails; he's all about the naked people !