The countdown continues!

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

20. Jo Duffy

Mary Jo Duffy (most often credited just as Jo Duffy) got her start at Marvel in the late 1970s as an editor. She soon got some freelance writing assignments, including a long stint writing Power Man and Iron Fist. Her 22-issue run on the book was the longest run on the book out of any of the books' many writers over the years. She impressively played up the off-kilter nature of the team-up with some good humor (on top of the good old fashioned superhero adventures, as well, of course).





She then settled in for an even longer run as the main writer for Marvel's Star Wars title, including writing the most bizarre time in the book's history, when Return of the Jedi ended and Duffy had the odd task of continuing the story but without knowing if Lucas planned on doing anything else in the future. She invented some fascinating concepts, including taking a character David Michelinie and Walter SImonson had invented (and killed off) Shira Brie, and brought her back as a bad ass killer cyborg called Lumiya. Lumiya was later dusted off and became a big part of the Star Wars expanded universe novels. Check out this epic battle between Luke and Lumiya by Duffy and artists Cynthia Martin and Bob Wiacek...

















Doesn't that make you want to buy one of those omnibi collecting the Marvel issues right now?

Duffy later became the original writer on DC's Catwoman ongoing series in the 1990s and she had a stint writing Rob Liefeld's Glory.

19. Kate Leth

Kate Leth got her start in comics through her hilarious and thoughtful webcomic, Kate or Die. Here is just a quick sample of the sort of thing you could expect to see on her site...



While Leth is a very strong artist, her writing has gotten her even more attention, especially at Boom!, where she became the regular writer on Bravest Warriors last year. Here is a short Bravest Warriors story she did (this one she drew - she doesn't draw the ongoing series) that shows off her off-the-wall sense of humor...













She also wrote a couple of Adventure Time graphic novels, including the best-selling Seeing Red (with artist Zack Sterling), which teamed-up Marceline and Jake in a search for Marceline's missing bass guitar...





Kate also does regular comics for Comics Alliance, which show off her sharp wit and great sense of modern day justice...





Kate will also be doing work for the upcoming romance comic series, Fresh Romance. She has such a wonderful voice, I love that the medium is opening up ways to hear more from her in different genres.

18. Rumiko Takahashi

I already wrote about how amazingly diverse Rumiko Takahashi's comic book career has been when she made the list as an artist. She is one of the most successful comic book creators in the history of the entire MEDIUM, selling well over 100 MILLION copies of her books since she got her start in the late 1970s in Japan.

Last time, I spotlighted her breakout hit, the bizarre romantic comedy, Urusei Yatsura, plus her smash successes of the gender-bending martial arts series, Ranma 1/2 and the fantasy epic, Inuyasha. So today, I will spotlight her horror epic, The Mermaid Saga, specifically The Marmaid's Scar.

This is really what makes Takahashi such a sterling example of comic book excellence. She can write cute, she can write epic, she can write adventure, but she writes something like The Mermaid's Scar and it's like, what? How can this be the same writer?!

The basic concept behind the Mermaid Saga is that mermaid flesh, if eaten, can give people immortality. However, it can kill you instantly or turn you into a monster. Given those chances - would you still give it a try?

The stories follow a 500-year-old name Yuta as he engages with others like him.

In Mermaid's Scar, we meet a really messed up "mother" and "son."

Check out Takahashi's excellent introduction of the mother/son dynamic...













Creeeeeepy.

You see, the boy is actually an 800-year-old immortal. He gives mermaid flesh to women to make them pretend to be his mother. He then, naturally, torments them, as shown above.

His current "mother," though, discovers that the flesh is wearing off quicker and she demands more...







The "boy" then decides to find a new woman to replace his mother, whether she's willing or not...





Dark, dark stuff. Takahashi's range as a writer is stunning. And yet she manages to succeed at every genre she tries! It's like she's some sort of magical being herself!

Go to the next page for #17-16!

17. Allie Brosh

American writer and artist Allie Brosh's webcomic Hyperbole and a Half launched her to massive fame, the kind of fame that means your book still sits at the top of Amazon best seller lists more than a year after it's published. The kind of fame that means you actually manage to CREATE memes. Both THE ALOT and CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! - which you may have seen or co-opted into your vocabulary - first appeared in Brosh's webcomics.

Brosh has talked about approaching her webcomics as if they're stand up and that's evident especially in the pacing. She lands each panel just right, sometimes repeating them several times as she pushes the moment for the biggest possible laugh and frequently interjecting bits of text between the panels. Her visual style is what I would call "crude cute" in that at first look it appears not particularly accomplished and a bit unrefined but is nevertheless magnificently accurate at landing jokes.

Brosh's blog, even BEFORE her book was published and became a NY Times Best Seller, reportedly attracted as many as 5 million viewers a month and it's no surprise. Brosh's hilarious slice of life comics are intensely relatable. Brosh herself is self-deprecating in the funniest possible ways and she ends up feeling like a champion of average joes, of failures everywhere. However Brosh's work is not just hilarious (though it generally is ALSO hilarious) it also tackles some serious and grim stuff, most notably her struggle with depression. Brosh approaches the subject with a brutal honesty that is massively insightful and impossible not to relate to, especially if you have ever suffered from depression yourself. Brosh pulls no punches in her text, and her "crude cute" drawing is the perfect offset for her sharp honest sense of humor.

You can feel safe in Brosh's hands...she's not there to judge you, she's there to make you laugh and let you know she's even worse at life than you are - though it helps to at least temporarily forget that Brosh is funnier, more talented, and (hopefully by now) much richer than the rest of us. Brosh prizes expression and storytelling over her comics looking particularly pretty or polished and the results are funnier and more emotional than most comics ever manage.

Here's the beginning of one of Brosh's excellent childhood tales - and one of many that you can read in its entirety for free on her blog. I've included the text she inserts between panels as it's part of her style and a good percentage of her writing, but I urge you to check it out yourself on her blog:













16. Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry is a fascinating case study in the evolution of an artist. Barry has been an excellent cartoonist for decades now, working as a comic strip creator since the late 1970s and more prominently since the early 80ss, when she and her friend, Matt Groening, were both bursting out of the independent newspaper comic scene.



However strong her early work was, though, she has only gotten better as time has passed.

Her first graphic novel came out in 1988, the acclaimed story of an interracial friendship, The Good Times Are Killing Me.

Her 2002 collection of strips, One! Hundred! Demons! was a very ambitious comic. It worked off of the idea of doing a twist on the Japanese zen painting exercise called “One Hundred Demons,” where you paint your "demons" in an effort to get them out of your system. In this case, Barry turns her demons into funny, engaging and heartfelt comic stories.

Probably the most popular story from the book was "Head Lice and my Worst Boyfriend," which was even featured in another book featuring different stories about heartbreak.



The basic gist of the story is that Barry first recalls a childhood trip to the Philippines, where she was told about head lice (she never had any lice as a child so she didn't know anything about them) from a boy she had a crush on and how lice in the United States was different from those in the Philippines. He asked her to send him "white kuto"...



This leads into the following tale of her "worst boyfriend"....









Barry followed One! Hundred! Demons! up with an even MORE ambitious work, What It Is, which was a unique work that served as both a memoir AND a teaching tool!

The book is split into a memoir of Barry's life through college plus a series of questions designed to get you thinking about writing and then, finally, an "activity book" of sorts whose goal is ALSO to get you to write.

Barry has been teaching a class called “Writing the Unthinkable” for many years, and this book is, in many ways, a summation of her teaching philosophies.



The memoir sections of the book are excellent, as Barry's evocative drawings really take you to the recesses of her memory, and her thoughts on her life are interesting and surprisingly direct.

Here are a few sample pages (all courtesy of the sample excerpt available at the web site for the book at Drawn & Quarterly)









As great as the memoir sequences are, the "star" of the book clearly is the collage artwork that accompanies Barry's many pages of questions meant to drive you to thinking differently about the very nature of writing and drawing.

Here are some sample pages...









The book continues much in this vein for most of it (until it becomes an outright "activity book" at the end), alternating between interesting stories of Barry's life (made all the more interesting due to the depth she reveals about herself) and thought-inducing questions about writing/drawing. It is so rich with possibilities.

The world of comics is blessed that we have people like Lynda Barry out there on the cutting edge, re-imagining what you can achieve with graphic works. And the students of the world are lucky that she currently stands to be most interested in passing her knowledge on to a new generation (her latest book, Syllabus: Notes From An Accidental Professor, released last year, follows in that vein).