You voted and we continue with the results for your picks for the top comic books and graphic novels of the 2010s.

95. Bitch Planet

Bitch Planet is a clever spin on the classic "women in prison" exploitation films of the 1970s by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro (with colors by Cris Peter initially and then Kelly Fitzpatrick). The idea of the book is that in the future, women are such second class citizens that the Patriarchy can literally send them to prison for stuff like being unattractive or otherwise defiant. We see this in action when we see a woman sentence to the prison for the temerity for objecting to her husband having an affair with another woman. In addition, the husband cuts a deal to eliminate his wife while in prison which, of course, IS ON ANOTHER PLANET!!

Kamau Kogo is the woman who decides that she is not going to let this poor woman just be murdered. She is a total badass. She sadly fails to prevent the woman's death, but her actions draw attention to her and she is recruited to put together a sports team made out of prisoners from the planet to compete against other male-only teams. She goes along with it because she is trying to find her sister, who she believes is hidden somewhere else on the planet in a secret other prison and when she finds her, she plans on trying to find a way to escape.

The series uses shifts in time to explore the personalities of the various other cast members, to give you the backgrounds of everyone in the series. It allows DeConnick and De Landro to quickly introduce new characters and still have you care about the additions very quickly.

Like most great science fiction, Bitch Planet takes real issues in society and exagerrates them to absurd degrees, but in the process, gets to the heart of the actual issues. For instance, "difficult" women don't literally get sent to another planet in outer space, but they are effectively treated as if they WERE from another planet. Few things can dismiss a woman as much as society determining, for whatever reason, that she is a "bitch." Deconnick and De Landro takes that impulse and makes the convention a literal one.

De Landro and Fitzpatrick do a wonderful job on the character expressions, a must for a character-driven series like this one. However, they also nail the action scenes.

94. Patience

Daniel Clowes got into some unfamiliar territory with this out there time travel story. A man's life is turned upside down when his pregnant wife is murdered and he is the prime suspect. He is eventually cleared after he served some time and had his life ruined. Years pass and eventually he gets to the point where, as an old man, he is finally around for the invention of time travel. He goes back in time to try to save his wife...

Of course, this being Clowes, it isn't going to be that straightforward. Things get darker and more twisted the more he tries to save his wife. As we travel through the past, we learn more about Patience and how she grew up. Jack, the protagonist, is obsessed with not only saving Patience's life, but also making her life better. Over time, though, as his journeys through time get increasingly absurd (all of this time travel is also really bad for Jack's body, which begins to break down), we have to wonder what Jack is even doing. What are his motivations? Is he really trying to help Patience, or have the years he spent following her death so twisted his point of view on life that he now exists for revenge only? These are complex questions that Clowes does not shy away from in this stunning piece of work by a graphic novel master.

93. Jem and the Holograms

Now, I knew Kelly Thompson was awesome for many years and everyone who followed the site knew she was awesome, too, with her great column here, but Jem and the Holograms was the first time that the comic book reading public as a whole got to see just how awesome she is (which is a lot). The concept of the series is that a group of four foster sisters take the leap to stardom when they use some special hologram technology to create a front for their lead singer known as Jem.

Thompson and artists Sophie Campbell and M. Victoria Robado manage to do a remarkable thing by actually significantly improving on the origin of the Jem concept without losing sight of what made the original series so iconic. The narrative hook that drives the book is that Jerrica Benton, lead singer of the band, has a serious case of performance anxiety, which gives us the reason why Jerrica would even NEED to perform as someone else. That's not something that was ever made particularly clear in the cartoon series.

Sophie Campbell's re-designed looks for the various members of the Holograms are remarkable, as she has found a way to re-design iconic characters and making them modern but also trying to diversify them in look and in body type while also staying true to their original designs. It's a tremendous achievement.

Robado's colors are perfectly in sync with Campbell, and when they do song sequences, you almost feel the music leaping off of the page.

Besides giving Jerrica a really good reason to create Jem, Thompson does two other significant things with this comic. She quickly not only defines the various characters and gives them distinct personalities, but she also puts them into conflict with each other. This is a very neat trick because there's rarely a better insight into who people really are than when they are arguing with each other. And what we see here is a wonderfully complex argument, with four foster sisters who care deeply about each other but also realize that Jerrica's problem is really and truly bringing the group down. Should love for your sister mean screwing over your own dreams? It's a great conflict and luckily, the whole "Super-realistic hologram technology and talking computer system" thing resolves that.

However, with all solutions come new problems, and the success of the new group setup draws attention from a reporter and the hatred of a rival band, the Misfits (while Jerrica's sister falls for one of the Misfits!). This is where Thompson truly shines SO bright, as there are typically like eleven or so characters in any given issue and Thompson juggles them all and makes it seem effortless...

When Campbell left the book, it was impressive to see just how well they were able to lose such a brilliant contributor, as Emma Vieceli, Jen Bartel, Meredith McClaren and Gisele Lagace kept the high quality level of artwork up (Robado's steady colors helped a lot, of course).

What a delightful series.

92. The Manhattan Projects

As you may or may not know, the secret government research and development group that put together the first nuclear weapons ever used was called The Manhattan Project. Well, the brilliant series The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman, Nick Pitarra and Jordie Bellaire reveals that the secret Manhattan Project was only the cover for the REAL secret research and development projectS going on at the Manhattan Projects.

Hickman and Pitarra take real life scientists like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi and put bizarre, over-the-top spins on them, like having Albert Einstein discover a gateway to another world where he meets a mirror universe version of himself, who promptly brains him and takes his place in our reality!

While Jordie Bellaire was not the first colorist on this series, she quickly put her stamp firmly on the book, as her colors are one of the most prominent aspects of the series. Few books rely quite as much on the coloring as does The Manhattan Projects, which you can see pretty clearly from the Einstein pages above. Pitarra is more than up to the task of drawing whatever bizarre things that Hickman can think of and in this case, that means a WHOLE LOT of crazy stuff.

What I found most impressive about the series is how well they made the transition from simply "Hey, here are all of these real life scientists, see how we do clever twists on each one of them" (which was good in and of itself, of course) to a larger scope of a story once World War II has been won with their nuclear bombs and so the scientists decide that they are the best suited people for determining the future of society. After the original series ended, the creative team returned for a wonderfully bizarre spin on the idea of space travel with Yuri Gugarin and Laika.

The whole series had a surprising amount of heart to back up the wild ideas of the "Weird science" deployed by the scientists in the series.

91. Thor Mighty Avenger

One of the things that comic book companies have always struggled with is how, exactly, to respond to the film success of their comic book characters. DC seemed fully unprepared for just HOW big the 1989 Batman movie was going to be, outside of a wonderful film adaptation by Denny O'Neil and Jerry Ordway, while their response to the next few Batman films was to release one-shots starring the villains from the respective movies. There were a lot of really good one-shots released at that time (John Ostrander, in particular, really did some excellent work), but it was still a bit of a restrained response to Batman's film success.

When Marvel movies became hits in the early 2000, Marvel, too, didn't seem to know what to do with the attention, either. After one of the very last film adaptations for the first Spider-Man movie, Marvel began to go the route of coming out with a few new series that theoretically could appeal to the people who were watching the new movies. So when Spider-Man 2 came out, there was a bunch of Doctor Octopus miniseries. Later, when Wolverine Origins came out, there was a Weapon X: First Class series with Wolverine and Gambit.

And thus, when Thor was released, Marvel put out a new, out of continuity, all ages Thor title called Thor: The Mighty Avenger by Roger Langridge, Chris Samnee and Matt Wilson.

The book revolved around Thor being stuck on Earth and developing a relationship with a different take on Jane Foster. Almost every issue (perhaps even EVERY issue?) involved a guest appearance by an established Marvel character, with Langridge, Samnee and Wilson putting their own particular spin on that character.

It was one of those cult classics that everyone knew was going to be a cult classic AS WE were enjoying it. It was like, "Wait, an out of continuity, all ages take on Thor and Jane Foster? There is no real comparison to this sort of thing on the market, which is probably not a good thing for the longevity of this series" and sure enough, the series did not last that long, but my goodness, while we all knew it was too good to last, we all knew it was good that we appreciated the heck out of it while it was coming out.

It was the sort of thing that people bought a copy for themselves and a copy to give friends, that's how beloved this series was by its audience. Nowadays, with the proliferation of the middle school market, I think Thor: Mighty Avenger would likely be a big hit (or at least it would have had a better chance) but heck, we all at least got to enjoy its heartfelt story and gorgeous artwork for ten issues (and a Free Comic Book Day story - Marvel loved this comic, too, they even gave it a Free Comic Book Day story!) and that's still an awesome thing to be able to say...

Luckily, there is a complete collection of the series that you can buy to appreciate it all new if you've never read it before.