Origins As people have been browsing this site, one question has time after time sprung to mind: What makes an otherwise somewhat socially adept 17-years old girl spend so much of her life doing a comic about Magical Girls and insects? Well, as all mysteries, this one has it's roots in the dark, dark past... ...more specifically, the summer of '99. It was a summer of joy, it was a summer of wonder. It was a summer of unfortunate and fortunate events comic together ready to create a chimera in the right person's mind. To be honest, it was the summer after the domestic release of 'A Bug's Life' and 'Antz' and yours truly was a bored adolescent of 12-going-on-13 who had just heard of Sailormoon for the first time in her short life and now found her mind bubbling with ideas that all in some way contained Magical Girls. Put two and two together. I will again be honest with you and say that the original concept of A.N.T stunk worse than a french toast stuck behind a drawer for six months. Originally, what we had was simply a nameless insect magical girl ("cause bugs are kewl!") and her guardian butterfly named Butterfay battling evil. Whether or not there were any termites I can't remember, but there definately were neither technology, (attempts at) humor nor characters with more depth than a sheet of paper. Luckily, even the me of back then could see that the concept was kinda a bummer, and it never made it further than a feeble idea in my head. The idea, however, remained there and surfaced quite a few times since then. In the following year, I came up with several more or less retarded versions of the A.N.T concept, all of which were either sugar-coated Magical Girl stories or Deep Dark Drama, which was probably worse. I can't remember all of them, but among them were versions where proto-Lisa (Lisa as we know her was not yet invented) became the A.N.T permanently, or where she shrank to antsize when transforming (in the same version, proto-Lisa turned out to actually be the ant princess in disguise. Original, oh god yes. >.<) At this time, the first drawings of the A.N.T started to pop up, which, aside from being horrible, all had one thing in common: I was still thinking of the A.N.T as a magical, organic thing. A magical, organic thing with a heart on it's forehead. The real breakthrough for A.N.T came in 2001 when I (probably after learning about Bubblegum Crisis) decided that the A.N.T would be a mecha rather than a Magical Girl. I'm still not quite sure what happened, but in a few weeks I had come up with a concept that just barely worked, the idea of the insects being aliens and, most importantly, Lisa. Lisa actually started out as a self-portrait (so now you have a pretty good idea of what I look like), but over the years she has grown more and more different from me and is now a character in her own right rather than a Mary-Sue equipped with all my negative traits. A lot of drawings stem from the time between December 2001 and somewhere in 2002, where most of the framework for the comic and many main characters was laid. By the end of 2002, however, my interest in the concept faded away, probably because I could see no chance of having it published anywhere (in case you don't know, Denmark has very little in the way of a comics industry - no, screw that. We have NO comics industry).
Of course, this all changed when I found ComicGenesis. I first signed up for an account here in fall of 2003 (which is also where the first three pages of Episode one date back from)
and started my glorious career by getting malleted by FAUB on the forums. Sadly or gladly, a lot of things were going on in my life at that point, so in the end, doing a webcomic
un a regular basis just seemed unrealistic. I drew a few pages over the course of the schoolyear (namely pages 1-6), but it wasn't until I signed up for the second time in summer
of 2004 that A.N.T finally moved on from being a childish Magical Girl fantasy to being an actual (childish) webcomic. And the rest is, as they say, history.
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