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Spoiler warning! Do not pre-acquire knowledge of this character's identity. Further information will be revealed at a future narrative stage. Thank you for your patience.
With a sleek new costume and honed capabilities, the new Ant-Man from the future carries on the heroic legacy of Hank Pym, Scott Lang, and Eric O'Grady.
One of these things is not like the others. "This new NFL running back carries on the legacy of Jim Brown, Walter Payton, and OJ Simpson." Maybe the implication is that Eric O'Grady will turn his life around and become not-a-giantic-creep at some point in the future? According to the Ant-Man "Ant-iversary" miniseries where this character first appeared, he's Dr. Zayn Asghar from the year 2549, inventor of the nano-ant swarm. Inspired by pre-Ultronic hero myths, Asghar uses his creation to combat paleo-capitalists and disaster opportunists - as the Ant-Man!
It really underscores how few Pym-releated characters there are to make toys of that this line has resorted to a guy you've never heard of.
All the other founding Avengers manage to hold their own ongoing titles for decades, but Ant-Man and the Wasp really only exist in the Avengers books, so their villains are Avengers villains and their supporting characters are Avengers supporting characters. Future Ant-Man's helmet is designed to look like an ant head, wide and domed, with mandibles in the front and a V-shaped antenna on the forehead. Technically the antenna just floated near the helmet instead of being attached, but that's not something a toy can do.
The comic Dr. Zayn first appeared in came out July 27 2022,
meaning this figure hit shelves just six days under a full year later. That may be the fastest turnaround we've ever seen! Of course, it's easy to be quick when you're just getting an existing body with a new head and new paint. If you look at the comic in question, you'll see that all those light dots should be raised above the surface of the body, not flat, but reminder: this is Future Ant-Man, and nobody cares about him. We're lucky they remembered/bothered to put the three down his back, when we'll more often be seeing his front. They did remember to paint the soles of his shoes red, though not the palms of the hands.
As far as Marvel futures go, Future Ant-Man's is kind of in the middle: you've got things like Days of Future Past or Bishop's world, that are at most a few decades ahead of us,
then the 2099/2211s, then like Guardians of the Galaxy or Cable's world, that are at least a millennium away. Zayn's world, Earth-14831, was conquered by Ultron and nearly sterilized, so part of attempting to rebuild was bringing keystone species back from extinction or finding ways to duplicate the work they did; that's why he desigend his nano-ants, which can break down solid matter, reconfigure it or even create it from stray atoms. That is not a thing that lends itself to action figure accessories, sadly, but this toy still could have come with the Aging Ray that's a part of the story. Or even alternate hands! He has nothing! Nothing!
(Free recipe for an alternate unmasked Dr. Asghar: any existing bearded head with browner skin and a little white streak on the top of the hair. Boom, done, value of this figure easily increased with minimal effort.)
He does include a piece for the Cassie Lang Build-A-Figure: the right arm.
Future Ant-Man is certainly... a choice. There may not be a ton of characters in Ant-Man's orbit, but this is certainly not one anyone could have predicted. We need a new Yellowjacket, we need the Rita DeMara Yellowjacket, we don't have a Nadia Van Dyne Wasp, as long as we're taking one-off appearances like Future Ant-Man we could get Nadia in her cool Black Widow "Orphan" suit, there are literally dozens of unmade Wasp costumes (including when Janet was dead and Hank was using the codename in her honor)... it would not be hard to fill a full Pym-themed Marvel Legends series without even once thinking of Future Ant-Man, yet here we are, with the utter definition of "half-assed effort" on our shelves.
-- 09/10/23
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