The countdown begins now!!!

Here are the first ten writers that you voted as your favorites of all-time (out of roughly 1,040 ballots cast, with 10 points for first place votes, 9 points for second place votes, etc.).

NOTE: Don’t be a jerk about creators in the comments section. If you are not a fan of a particular creator, that’s fine, but be respectful about it. No insulting creators or otherwise being a jerk about creators. I’ll be deleting any comments like that and, depending on how jerky the comment was, banning commenters.

50. Daniel Clowes – 199 points (2 first place votes)

For years, Daniel Clowes used his long-running comic book series Eightball to house his trademark offbeat examinations of the human spirit. For most of Eightball's run, individual issues served as parts of stories that would be collected into graphic novels. Perhaps most famous was Eightball #11-18, titled Ghost World, which viewed the life of a disaffected young woman named Enid. It was adapted into an acclaimed film, as was an earlier Eightball story titled Art School Confidential.

In this excerpt from Ghost World, Enid and her friends discover that detachment is not always what it is cracked up to be...







Clowes' ability to cut to the heart of any matter and make nearly any character worth giving a crap about is striking.

49. James Robinson - 202 points (1 first place vote)

James Robinson has done a lot of great work in comics over the years, from the excellent Golden Age mini-series to his underrated Firearm series for Ultraverse to his compelling current series at Image with J. Bone, The Saviors. However, he is still best known for his sweeping, nearly decade-long run on Starman, starring his creation, Jack Knight.

While Jack is nominally the star of Starman, the REAL star is the city Jack and his father, Ted (the Golden Age Starman), live in - Opal City. Throughout the series, a message writer James Robinson gets across is an appreciation for the classics, and Opal City is a whole city that is BUILT around that notion - that the classic stories need a city, too, and that's what Opal City. This leads to the Shade, a classic villain who Robinson re frames as an almost immortal man who just wants to enjoy his time in Opal City, the city he loves. The Shade even ended up getting his own series!

There is a family of cops in Opal City, the O'Dares, who also play a major role in the series, including former crooked cop Matt O'Dare who is pushed into heroism by the spirit of his ancestor. Starman was one of the most cultured superhero comics - you'd have stuff like thugs debating the works of Stephen Sondheim!!

In fact, that'll be our sample. From #14, a spotlight on the O'Dares...









48. Kieron Gillen - 213 points (3 first place votes)

After making a name for himself on the creator-owned series Phonogram, with artist Jamie McKelvie, Kieron Gillen began to bring his particular sense of style over to Marvel Comics, most notably in a run on Journey Into Mystery where Loki has been reborn as a pre-teen after sacrificing himself during Siege. Stuck in a land where everyone knows him (and hates him) for the evil he did as an adult but can not bring themselves to get rid of him as a pre-teen (the fact that his brother, Thor, insisted that he stick around certainly helped). While apparently not evil like his older self was, Loki still has all of the skills he had in his past life, including a strong ability to con people.

Gillen introduced a few notable supporting cast members, including Ikol, a magpie who is the representation of Loki's former evil life and Leah, a handmaiden of Hela, who was ordered to help Loki.

Gillen's stories were marked by both clever plots and clever dialogue, not to mention really heartfelt ideas of the very notion of whether someone truly CAN be redeemed. This is exemplified beautifully in an issue drawn by Mitch and Bettie Breitweiser (Gillen has had a lot of artists work with him on this series) where Loki is given a litter of hel-wolves (prodigy of his servent, the Hel-Wolf, who apparently impregnated Garm, guardian of Hel). He is able to find homes for all but one of the wolves, who appears to be just plain evil. Told to get rid of the wolf, the parallels between the wolf and Loki are not hard to see...







After a forward-thinking run on Young Avengers (with McKelvie), Gillen and McKelvie are back at their creator-owned roots with the enthralling Wicked + Divine.

Go to the next page for #47-44...

47. Jaime Hernandez - 216 points

Jaime Hernandez has been telling the story of his famed creation, Maggie, for over thirty years now, and what is particularly amazing to me is the way that he has been using that history to make the comics even stronger in recent years. Take the brilliant "The Love Bunglers," where Maggie gets a second chance at love with Ray, her former love interest (most famously from "The Death of Speedy Ortiz" in the early 1980s). Hernandez has done such wonderful work with Maggie over the years that we know her as well as we know any longtime friend or family member. We know how she works. We know her quirks. We know her best qualities. We know her worst qualities. And all of them are at play when she gets involved with Ray again, with both now middle-aged. Hernandez's skills are readily apparent in the control he maintains over their interactions, both with the dialogue and also his incredible skills with characterization. It's stunning, really, to see how good he was with these characters thirty years ago and yet he is even BETTER now!

Check out this date. Try not to be affected by these interactions...









Hernandez uses flashbacks to gives depth to the modern day interactions, as we the reader know exactly how the past is affecting the present but no one else in the present knows what we do. It is pretty heartbreaking and powerful stuff.

46. art spiegelman - 224 points (2 first place votes)

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning comic book work, Maus, demonstrates his great complexity as a writer. Maus is not just a brilliant re-telling of one man's tale of survival during World War II and the Holocaust (with the jews as mice and the Germans as cats). It's also the tale of a man dealing with his father. It's also the tale of how stories are told. And perhaps most fascinating to me is that it also eventually becomes about a man dealing with the fact that his personal story about his father's survival of the Holocaust has become a commercial and critical success. How does one reconcile oneself with something like that? Spiegelman addresses it beautifully in this story. Here's a snippet from later in the series from when Spiegelman deals with the strange turn of events that came about after the release of the first maus book...









45. Dave Sim - 231 points (3 first place votes)

Dave Sim has done other comic book works, and they've been good, but it is pretty clear that his career is going to be known for his work on a certain short grey-skinned anthropomorphic aardvark. Cerebus originally debuted as a satire of Conan the Barbarian (along with other pop culture figures were featured). Cerebus was a hard-living mercenary with little morality who got involved in various adventures.

This changed with the second storyline, the 25-part epic, High Society, where Cerebus gets involved with politics, applying his rough and tumble style to the world of, well, high society. Through this, he ends up becoming Prime Minister, although that does not exactly work out, leading to the massive two-part epic, Church & State, which took about 60 issues, and involved Cerebus becoming Pope.

As you might imagine, Cerebus is corrupted by the power...









These stories saw a change in the series to becoming one of the most intelligent ongoing comic book series out there, with a great deal of wit and wisdom.

The rest of the series have a series of slightly-less focused stories, although, as the title continued, the work took on an approach more similar to Sim's own life, which included heavier religious overtones, plus specific attacks upon feminism/homosexuality. Sim never stopped doing parodies, though, and throughout the run, comics and pop culture and life, in general, were given parody treatment (The Punisher and Sandman being two notable examples).

44. Keith Giffen - 260 points (2 first place votes)

Keith Giffen has worked as a plotter on a number of classic series, from his beginning on Legion of Super-Heroes with Paul Levitz to his continued work on the Legion (where he and Tom and Mary Bierbaum dramatically altered the world of the Legion). He has done flat-out humor with Ambush Bug and he has done more serious fare (like his current Futures End series he is co-writing). His most famous work, though, is definitely his run on Justice League with scripter J.M. DeMatteis. The concept of the book is that Giffen had to come up with an idea for a Justice League where most of the top heroes were now no longer available to him after Crisis.

Without the major heroes, Giffen instead attempted to develop the personalities of the heroes they WERE given, particularly once two of the heroes they were given, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, lost their individual series, as that gave Giffen free reign with how to write them. Giffen also spotlighted the League liaison, Maxwell Lord, who formed the team for fairly nefarious reasons but soon turned out to be a good guy. Later on, due to a lack of female characters on the team (and notable female heroes available period) when Canary was taken from them, Giffen added two obscure members of the Global Guardians who soon became stalwart members of the team, Fire and Ice.

The book is most known for the humor of the title, which was a major aspect of the book - it really was a situation comedy.

Here is the first usage of "Bwah Ha Ha" that shows what the comedy of the book was like...







Giffen and DeMatteis built this strange superhero book up to becoming one of DC's most popular comics for five years!

Go to the next page for #43-41...

43. Carl Barks - 308 points (13 first place votes)

What was so amazing about Carl Barks' work on Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge was not only the fact that he was a wonderfully skilled artist (he was a born storyteller and the amount of characterization he could get across while working with talking DUCKS is astonishing) but that his stories had such a great DEPTH to them. Kids would not only be entertained by his fun stories, but they would LEARN things about different parts of the world and about world history and myths. Barks has a voracious appetite for knowledge and he expressed this appetite in his stories.

Not only that, but Barks also had an impressive ability to tell complex stories about the human...er...duck condition, like with the amazing Back to the Klondike. Uncle Scrooge has been taking memory pills (he does not take them too often as they cost ten cents apiece so he doesn't want to be wasteful) and suddenly he remembered an old adventure he had gone on in the Klondike with an old sort of girlfriend, Glitterin' Goldie. He heads to the Klondike to recoup the money he knows she owes him and once there, they go on a series of adventures trying to find her and once they DO find her, Scrooge's nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, who Barks used to great effect in his stories, especially the Boy Scout-like group they belonged to, the Junior Woodchucks) regret the fact that Scrooge is going to take this nice old woman for all she has got. Or is he?









Amazing.

42. Mike Mignola - 322 points (1 first place vote)

It's funny, when Hellboy began, there was some concern (even from Mignola himself) as to how Mignola would handle the writing side of things. We all knew it would look amazing (as it is Mike Mignola we're talking about here) but how would the stories be? Well, such concern was unwarranted as Mignola turned out to possibly be an even better writer than he is an artist, which is shocking considering how good of an artist he is.

In Hellboy (about a demon who fights for the side of good), Mignola explores a great variety of folklore tales and different takes on great literature ideas. The character of Hellboy is such an open concept (he can adapt to action, adventure, horror or fantasy with great ease) that Mignola can really do whatever he wants with the series, and the result has been a variety of fascinating stories. Here's a bit from the first Hellboy story written entirely by Mignola (he originally had John Byrne script the feature)...









Powerful stuff.

41. Gail Simone - 354 points (3 first place votes)

Gail Simone's work for years has maintained a delightful balance between humorous and darkness. 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. Perhaps the best example of this approach was in her acclaimed run on Secret Six (which she JUST returned to earlier this week with a new ongoing series from DC), where she had 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/Scott 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. It is a difficult balance to strike and it was one that Simone struck well for years.