You voted and now we continue our countdown of your votes for the top original graphic novels of all-time! These are graphic novels that were not serialized as comic books before they were released as graphic novels.

Enjoy!

10. Blankets (2003)

In this beautiful auto-biographical graphic novel, Craig Thompson tells the story of his life as someone slowly coming to terms with the fact that he wasn't a Christian the same way that his Evangelical family was. It opens with a series of stories about his life growing up with his younger brother and their strict, religious parents. We see Craig and young Phil go through a lot of hardships (bullying and sexual abuse) while also trying to carve out a little piece of the world where they can have fun. This is mostly shown through their adventures on their shared bed growing up. Their blankets become a ship at sea and, of course, there is always going to be a shipwreck.

As he gets older, Craig seemingly finds a new way to fit in with the other "outcasts" at his Christian camp, including his first love, Raina, a fellow Christian who is also questioning things like Craig. He gets a chance to spend time at her home with her family and after he shares a story of his brother and his adventures with their blankets, she tells a story of how she would use her blankets as a table for an elaborate food game.

Of course, though, them being hormonal teenagers, well, the blankets are used for other purposes...

Thompson's work often has a real ethereal nature to it. His coming of age story is one of the best ones of his generation.

9. Marvel Graphic Novel #49: Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom - Triumph and Torment (1989)

One of the subplots that Doctor Doom had for years was the fact that his mother's soul was captured by a demon (later specified as Mephisto). Well, in the Marvel Universe, there is kind of a guy who specializes in helping people in that sort of situation and Roger Stern wrote his adventures for a number of years.

So, in this graphic novel by Stern and Mike Mignola and Mark Badger, Doctor Strange is enlisted to help Doom free Doom's mother's soul from Mephisto.

The result is an artistic tour de force by Mignola...

This is one of those ideas where you can't believe that someone actually let Stern change continuity this dramatically in a graphic novel, but once they let him do it, it was just sort of a no-brainer for an engaging story.

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8. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978)

This collection of short stories by Will Eisner was a major historical achievement in terms of the progression of the graphic novel, as Eisner's success with this format buoyed the case for others to use this set-up for their future stories.

This book contains four stories about Jewish characters that live in the tenements of New York City. Eisner returned to this specific neighborhood for many comic stories in the years to come.

The most famous of the four stories is the title story, about a man whose daughter dies and he can't come to grips with the fact that he had a "contract" with God. He would do good things and therefore good things would happen to him - that's how this should work, right? But, of course, that's not how things go...

However, once Hersh turns his back on God and begins to live a non-religious life, he learns a tragic lesson.

Eisner's art is stunning, with the characterizations just popping off of the page.

7. Persepolis (2000)

This is a tricky one, since Persepolis was initially released as four shorter books in France and when it was translated into English, the four books were then packaged into two books, but in reality, it's just one big story that was split into individual books as a matter of practicality, not because this was a serialized narrative (much like My Favorite Thing is Monsters). And obviously, the full story has been collected, as well, so I'm willing to count it as a graphic novel.

In any event, the book tells the story of Marjane Satrapi from her childhood in Iran through her teen years in Europe and her later return to Iran and her eventual return back to Europe.

The book begins with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, where we see how a young girl would adapt to her whole life being turned upside down by the institution of new restrictions on dress and schooling. Her parents hate the new status quo, as well, and what Satrapi captures beautifully throughout the book is that constant state of fear that you might be killed at any moment, just for living your life the way that you want to live it. Satrapi refers to it as the "precarity of survival."

Look at this bit from early in the book where her father is late returning home and obviously everyone just has to assume that he is dead...

Satrapi's artwork is powerful and her story manages to take complex ideas and make them immediately relatable. There is a reason that this has become such a modern classic, including an acclaimed film adaptation.