ESPN and Marvel Display the Heroism of Women in Sports

In a striking blend of female empowerment and corporate synergy, ESPN has teamed with Marvel to commission a variety of comics artists to draw superheroic portraits of the 2015 Impact 25, a list of women who have had an "impact" on sports in the past year.

The images are uniformly striking, but they vary in both the familiarity of the subjects and the level of "super heroification" of the art. So on one end of the spectrum you have a Tron take on tennis giant Serena Williams by Aspen Comics artist Elizabeth Torque, and a literally world-spanning Women's National Soccer Team by the Ghosted art team of Goran Sudzuka and Miroslav Mrva. And on the other end you have camera-wielding filmmaker Lauren Greenfield by Joelle Jones and Rachelle Rosenberg, who handled the art for the recent Mockingbird one-shot, and a moody take on prima ballerina Misty Copeland by Black Canary artist Annie Wu.

ESPN credits the work to "Marvel artists," but many of the people involved are best known for work at other companies, and some seem to have barely worked for Marvel, if at all. But the artists on this project include a higher percentage of women and people of color than seem to be working for Marvel at any given time, so we should probably be thankful ESPN wasn't limited by Marvel's current roster.

Check out all the artwork, including cool sliders that let you see the original pencils, on the ESPN web site.