Ant-Man #5: Reaching Our Final Pest-ination

Action-heavy and often text-lite outside of quips and banter, Ant-Man #5 is a breezy read that feels like it’s over almost as soon as it’s begun. Heavily weighted towards plot rather than character development, the relationship between the father-daughter crime-fighting duo feels regrettably underwritten. However, the action sequences do a nice job illustrating the trust Scott is finally beginning to put in Cassie. That said, this Ant-Man mini never set out to be a gritty reinterpretation of the insectoid hero. More than anything, Ant-Man #5 feels like a kaiju movie in both scale and tone: it may not make you question your place in the universe, but sometimes it’s nice to scarf popcorn and gawp at something fifty-foot-tall instead.

Dylan Burnett continues to create a fine balance between something classically comic-book-y and something utterly grotesque, goofy facial expressions and onomatopoeia sharing real-estate with creepy crawlies and insect entrails. Massive panels add to the kaiju-movie-esque sense of scope. The mood of Burnett’s art is perfectly matched and intensified by Mike Spicer’s colors, equally seamless in their movement between the brilliant and the delightfully sickening. For such a bug-centric title, it’s been pleasant to see an eagle hawk-moth alongside the fever-dream monstrosities of the Bug Lords and Macrothorax.

The cover art, for its part, is well-drawn, highly saturated, and dynamic. It communicates the action-driven nature of the issue, even if, like previous covers, it says perhaps too little about the plot.