Well, well! It’s official. Erik Larsen owns the ANT character. Eagle-eyed fans noticed that when Ant showed up in a recent Savage Dragon comic, no ownership credit was given to the character’s  creator, Mario Gully. For many readers that was a pretty solid tip that Erik had purchased the heroine. Anyway, it’s still awesome to have confirmation. It would seem that Erik also received some of Ant’s supporting cast in the deal.  Mario Gully will do a final story with Erik to sort of tie up loose ends and then it’s onward to new directions. This seems reminiscent of Erik’s approach on the recent Supreme relaunch. It will be exciting to see what developments come from this!

Larsen stated the following regarding his plans:

I bought ANT from Mario Gully. Mario wanted to sell and he’d gotten an offer and he contacted me because he knew I liked the character and had done a lot of thinking about how to make her work to see if I’d be interested. He wanted me to buy the character because he thought I’d do a better job with the character and he didn’t want to see her getting messed up. There was no dickering. He told me what he wanted and I paid his asking price.

As to what my plans are–I’m not 100% sure. I don’t want to simply dump her into Savage Dragon and have her become just another supporting character. I think, at least initially, that I’ll wrap up the book where Mario left it (I need closure) and then do a miniseries or something. I might even do another ongoing if I feel up to it.

Mario sold half of the character–and then I bought both halves.

ANT from Image can be mentioned–yes. ANT from Arcana and elsewhere? No. It won’t be addressed or acknowledged and I don’t have all of the rights beyond the Image stuff. There are characters in them which I don’t own or have access to.

A trade is not in the cards. The series is, frankly, a mess. Five different writers over 11 issues contradicting and overstepping each other–writing things into and out of continuity. It’s a minefield. My goal is going to be to address the mess–and move on.

The next volume all but starts things over. So much of her “life” was flashbacks and false memories it’s hard to know where to begin and what to consider canon or not. She never really met anybody for the first time–everybody had already met her and she had forgotten about it. There were all kinds of hints to her mysterious past and no payoffs. So, in a way, it would be better to not dwell too much on what came before–and with all of the dead ends and unfinished plot lines it would be better not to collect it all.

I need to look forward–not back.

Erik also posted a few images on his Facebook account using old Ant comic book covers to test out a new Ant logo. Erik stated the following:

This is a cover to an older issue of ANT by Mario Gully. I laid out this cover for him. It’s sporting the new ANT logo for the upcoming book.