Top 25 Female Comic Book Writers #3-1

The countdown concludes!

Here are the last three writers that you voted as your favorites of all-time. Click here for the master list of all of the creators listed so far.

3. G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson's first major comic book work was the graphic novel Cairo for Vertigo, with artist MK Perker. The series follows a group of six people in Cairo in an complex, interconnected tale of intrigue...

She and Perker teamed up again for the ongoing series Air for Vertigo, about a flight attendant who gets recruited into a secret organization. As the series progresses, her adventures take her beyond space and time themselves...

The series ran for two years and ended in 2010.

Wilson then did some work with Marvel on a few different series while also working on her first novel, the critically acclaimed Alif the Unseen, which was released in 2013.

The following year, she debuted the massively successful new Ms. Marvel comic book series (with artist Adrian Alphona) about a Muslim teenage girl living in Jersey City who suddenly discovers that she has the ability to control her body in a variety of ways (like shrinking, growing, making her body elastic or strong, stuff like that). This, of course, puts her into conflict with her strict brother and even stricter parents...

This engaging new series has been a crossover hit for Marvel Comics, opening comic sales to a whole new arena with the major success of the series in digital media. Wilson is also currently writing X-Men for Marvel, which also shows off her skills with female leads.

Go to the next page for #2-1!

2. Gail Simone

Gail Simone first made a name for herself on the website Women in Refrigerators and her hilarious column on Comic Book Resources, You'll All Be Sorry. That soon transitioned her into comic book writing, first for Bongo on their Simpsons line of comics...

She next took over Deadpool as the title transitioned into a relaunched Agent X series. It was here that Simone first made it evident that she was far more than just a funny writer (while, of course, still being quite funny), as her Deapdool/Agent X work was humorous but with some really dark edges to it.

Simone left Marvel and began work on the book that she is perhaps still best known for, Birds of Prey, which she wrote for nearly fifty issues (plus a second run right before the New 52). She added Huntress to the team alongside Black Canary and Oracle. Simone excels at character interactions and the driving force in the series was clearly the friendship between these three strong, independent women. Simone's dialogue was also top notch. Here's an example of the foundation that the book was built on, as the three women share some time off together...

During this period, Simone also launched Welcome to Tranquility, a delightful series based upon the idea that the town of Tranquility, Oregon, is a home to retired superheroes and supervillains and their families. So the town sheriff had quite a lot on her plate.

While Birds of Prey is probably Simone's most notable work at DC, I think her work on Secret Six did an even better job of capturing that delightful balance between humorous and darkness that you can see in so much of her work. She basically has a way of finding the humanity in dark stories, while at the same time, having enough dark stuff happen in her work that that humanity has to work to show itself. Secret Six was perfect for this because it was ABOUT a group of supervillains working together as team, primarily Deadshot, Catman and Scandal Savage.

The key element to the series was the emotional connections that these rogues shared with each other (Bane became a major cast member in the ongoing series, as well. Other characters came and went, as well, with Simone creation Jeannette being the other longest-lasting new addition). Here is a great example of the bond between the team members from the first Secret Six mini-series (so after Villains United and before the ongoing series), where Scandal is trying to find out who tried to kill her lover...

Sadistic AND touching all at once.

When the New 52 hit, Simone launched Barbara Gordon into her own series as Batgirl once again. She also did an intriguing series called The Movement about a group of underground, politically motivated heroes.

Outside of DC, she had been doing a really great job on Dynamite's Red Sonja series, where she came up with a strong new origin for Red Sonja (an origin that helped drive the first story arc in the series)...

1. Kelly Sue DeConnick

Let me just give a quick shout out to Gail Simone one last time. She and DeConnick were heads and shoulders above everyone else, votes-wise. DeConnick only slightly edged her out (although then her lead got a bit bigger after I went back through the votes and picked up all the various ways people misspelled DeConnick).

Kelly Sue DeConnick's rise to comic stardom has been one built on a decade of hard work. She worked for years as a translator of Japenese and Korean comics before slowly but surely getting some assignments on Marvel, including some excellent turns on one-shots featuring Sif and Pepper Potts (the Pepper Potts one was particularly good). She got her big break in 2011 when she wrote a mini-series spotlighting Norman Osborn (this was the series she first worked with artist Emma Rios on). It showed a well-honed ability to get into people's heads and come up with a character who is most terrifying in how he can get into people's heads...

After a great (but very brief) stint on Supergirl (how DC didn't hire her to write Supergirl for the New 52 is still beyond me, but their loss was soon Marvel's gain), she launched Captain Marvel at Marvel, bringing Carol Danvers into greater prominence in the Marvel Universe. It is little surprise that after DeConnick's work on the character, she's suddenly considered strong enough for Marvel to be giving her her own motion picture as part of Marvel's Phase 3.

One of the things that I found most compelling about DeConnick's Captain Marvel work was the way that it really embraced strong women, outside of just Carol herself. The "Carol Corps" soon became a real rallying cry (some of the strong female characters that she invented will be starring in their own mini-series this June, which DeConnick will be writing with our own Kelly Thompson). Just check out how awesome this is handled at the end of the first volume of Captain Marvel by DeConnick...

Around this time, she also had stints on Avengers Assemble at Marvel and Ghost at Dark Horse. But clearly, her greatest works were still to come, as her two Image creator-owned series have been phenomenal.

With Emma Rios, she has been telling the epic fantasy of death in the west as Death's daughter herself rides in Pretty Deadly...