I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of coaching trees in the National Football League. NFL coaching trees are effectively the sports equivalent of a family tree, systems that find a head coach getting hired and, upon their success, seeing their tendrils spread throughout the league. Their coordinators get hired as head coaches, their position coaches get hired as coordinators, even their players get early shots at top coaching slots, and so on and so forth.

It’s an interesting topic because it’s easy shorthand for which coaches have been the most influential. It’s one thing to be a successful coach. It’s another one altogether to have your approach impact the rest of the league, with the expansiveness of a coaching tree quickly helping you understand just how significant someone has been to the sport. 12 The initial success is naturally the most important. But if you’re a head coach who begets other impactful coaches and coordinators? That shows how potent the root was even beyond basic qualitative measures.

While this is a sports-specific idea, the framework — as with many in sports — is one I’ve mentally translated to comics on occasion. There’s a reason for that: this idea of influence trees is something that can apply to nearly any concept within the medium, ranging from writers and artists to even the comics themselves. While it’s easy to point to the major creator or comic trees from comic history, 13 sometimes the most impactful ones can be slept on. That’s why today, I’m going to make the case for one of the quiet greats in recent memory with a take that’s about as close to hot as I can possibly get.

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers family of books over at BOOM! Studios lowkey has one of the strongest artist trees of any direct market franchise in the past decade plus.

This may be surprising if you’re unfamiliar with what BOOM! has been doing with the license since it first launched Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in 2016. But over the past seven plus years, the franchise has become home to some of the strongest superhero art in comics, proving to be a crucial steppingstone in the artistic journeys of top names like Dan Mora, Daniele Di Nicuolo, Simone Di Meo, Eleonora Carlini, and more in the process. It’s still going too.

This has long been a curiosity to me. As someone who has never read the titles and only briefly flirted with the show when I was younger, the semi-regular elevation of former Power Rangers artists into the stratosphere has always drawn my attention, and often made me wonder, “Why the Power Rangers?”

After digging into it, a better question may have been its opposite: “Why not?” As I discovered by exploring the story behind this franchise’s art and how it pushed the talents behind it to grow, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise might be the perfect incubator for the next big things in direct market comics — and an ideal place to find action-packed, electric art from some real up-and-comers, if you’re into that sort of thing.