Our every four years countdown of your all-time favorite comic book writers and artists continues!

Here are the next three artists that you voted as your favorites of all-time (out of roughly 1,008 ballots cast, with 10 points for first place votes, 9 points for second place votes, etc.).

6. Steve Ditko – 1599 points (22 first place votes)

During the early 1960s, there were a few different artists working at Marvel Comics, but really, it was Jack Kirby and it was Steve Ditko. They were routinely taking fairly mundane science fiction and fantasy stories and giving them a lot more panache than they deserved.

When Stan Lee slowly turned the company into a superhero comic book company again, Kirby and Ditko were given the chance to tell long form stories for the first time in years.

Ditko complied with the design of Spider-Man, one of the greatest superhero designs of all-time. Steve Ditko is one of the all-time great superhero/supervillain designers, coming up with a variety of costumes that are basically used today to the TEE. Spider-Man has had another costume, but really, the blue and the red costume is what he wears in the comics today and in all of the media adaptations (although the new movie is slightly different). And 50 years later, it is still that same Ditko design. Characters like Elektro, Vulture and Mysterio have gone through various looks but they always return to that awesome Ditko design.

Green Goblin, Kraven, Fancy Dan, the list goes on of iconic character looks that Ditko created.

But not only that, Ditko is a brilliant sequential storyteller, able to pack in SO much story into every issue of Amazing Spider-Man. These things are like freaking TOMES! The origin of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy is, like, a page and a half (okay, 11 pages) and Ditko makes it feel like it is seven issues long. The same continued in his run on Amazing Spider-Man. He packed SO much story into every issue while never making the panels boring.

Also, he could tell so much just by his art. The classic "lifting machinery" scene from Amazing Spider-Man #33 can be told pretty much solely through the artwork.

Meanwhile, over on Doctor Strange, Ditko was coming up with ideas so stunning and visuals so daring that they were unlike anything ever shown before in a superhero comic book series. Check out this stunning sequence from one of Ditko's last issues on the title (Ditko was psychedelic before psychedelic was a thing!)...

Back in the day, these were key exhibits in the argument that "comics weren't just for kids!"

5. Neal Adams – 1753 points (15 first place votes)

In the 1960s, there were artists who would work for DC Comics and Marvel Comics, but they would often use pen names for their Marvel work, not wanting to piss DC off. If they decided to go full-time at Marvel, they'd eventually use their real names (like Gene Colan eventually going by his real name instead of Adam Austin, which was always funny as few artists are as distinct as Gene Colan, so hiding it was a pen name was always kind of silly). Otherwise, artists had to commit to one company or the other, just to make sure they'd get regular assignments. Neal Adams changed that, by being so good that no one would dare tell him he couldn't do whatever he wanted to.

He drew X-Men and Avengers for Marvel and he had a seven-year stint on the Batman titles for DC while also being the regular cover artist for most DC Comics in the early 1970s (he also had a famous stint on Green Lantern with writer Denny O'Neil that dealt with the social issues of the day).

Adams "only" drew roughly thirty stories featuring Batman in that seven year period from 1968-1975 (and roughly eight of them were in World's Finest and Brave and the Bold), but that is all he needed to be recognized as the greatest Batman artist ever, as that is how much of an impact his work on Batman in the early 1970s had on readers and his fellow artists.

In Batman #251, he brought back the murderous Joker...

while also helping to reshape our view of Batman as a hunter...

In the classic introduction of Ra's Al Ghul, the famous fight where Batman is left for dead before Talia Al Ghul gives him an antidote to scorpion venom, Adams defined that era's take on the action-driven love hero Batman...

Not only is Neal Adams' approach to "realistic" comic book art (which is dynamic in a way that goes beyond realism, hence the quotes) dramatically different from most comic book artists using a similar style, he was ESPECIALLY different from what your typical comic artist looked like back in the late 1960s. For readers, it was akin to leaving Kansas and ending up in Oz. That's how dramatic the shift was. And within a few years, everyone was trying to draw just like him. Adams was a force of nature - veteran artists and new artists alike all had to adapt to his art style. He's pretty much the most influential American comic book artist of the past 50 years, and he had a major impact on many of the artists on this list (Bill Sienkiewicz, John Byrne, Alan Davis, Bryan Hitch and many more)

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4. Jim Lee -1779 points (44 first place votes)

After breaking in at Marvel in the late 1980s as one of editor Carl Potts' discoveries, Jim Lee really started to make a name for himself while working with Potts as the art team on Punisher War Journal (to keep the book on deadline, Potts would do layouts and then Lee would do finishes and then draw the cover on his own).

Then comic book history changed when Lee did a fill-in issue of Uncanny X-Men. He was quickly brought back for more issues and soon became the regular artist on Uncanny X-Men, eventually becoming the co-plotter of the series with writer Chris Claramont. Lee and Claremont revitalized an already strong X-Men series and soon Lee was launching a brand-new X-Men series, with a first issue that still has the record for the most copies sold of a single comic book.

Lee was pretty much the most popular artist in comics and fellow artists Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld were able to convince Lee to come over and co-found Image Comics with them. Jim Lee's Wildstorm Studios was likely the most successful studio of the various Imae studios. Eventually, Lee split his studio off from Image and sold it to DC Comics.

Lee slowly began to do more work for DC Comics and eventually became one of DC's two publishers.

While at DC, Lee shook the comic industry by drawing Batman for a full YEAR back in 2002-03. It was one of the biggest comic book events in years. Writer Jeph Loeb knew he had a wonderful opportunity to have Jim Lee draw pretty much every major Batman character that there was, so Loeb used the storyline Hush to do just that - each issue was a spotlight on a different major Batman character, from villains to heroes to whatever Catwoman is. During the storyline, Lee also used a new approach where he would sort of take a watercolors approach to flashbacks. It was quite striking. Here, in Batman #614, Batman struggles with whether he should finally just kill the Joker - see how Lee depicts Batman's flashbacks...

After Hush, Lee had another stint on a "regular" Batman comic book series, drawing All Star Batman and Robin with writer Frank Miller. Since then, Lee has been used as a sort of dramatic attraction for series, launching Justice League in the New 52 with Geoff Johns, launching a new Superman title with Scott Snyder, Superman Unchained, when Man of Steel came out and launching Suicide Squad in DC Rebirth.