elizabeth torque

Aftershock Comics has emerged as one of the most interesting new publishers in a long time, making a bold impact on the industry with titles like Insexts and Captain Kid. Headed up by editorial veteran Mike Marts, Aftershock has assembled an all-star line-up of talent, and today announced that Chew's John Layman and comics legend Sam Kieth will join the publisher for Eleanor and the Egret, a crime caper about an art thief and her pet bird.

The inevitable happens in Venom #5, by Mike Costa and Gerardo Sandoval, when the symbiote and its host get into a knock-down drag-out fight with the guy the symbiote has never forgiven for rejecting it, the Spider-Man known as Peter Parker. And Marvel is observing the event throughout the month of March with Venomized Variant covers that depict the heroes of the Marvel Universe overtaken by the Venom symbiote.

It’s that blessed time of the year where we all try to take stock of what we’ve done with our lives and what other people have created that we enjoyed. That's right, it's time to start putting together our "Best of 2016" lists, and today we're going to take a look at the Best Marvel Covers of 2016.

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.