After nearly 1,100 ballots were cast, YOU the reader ranked your favorite comic book characters from 1-10. I assigned point totals to each ranking and then tabulated it all into a Top 50 list. We're revealing that list throughout the rest of the month (and okay, maybe a little bit into November). The countdown continues now...

10. Deadpool – 1031 points (7 first place votes)

Created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza in one of the last issues of New Mutants before the book became X-Force, Wade Wilson, Deadpool, is known as "the merc with a mouth," as he is a highly sought-after mercenary who, well, talks a lot.

Deadpool is a funny guy, and thanks to Joe Kelly, he had one of the funniest comics of the late 90s, especially the issue where Kelly had Deadpool go back in time to an early issue of Amazing Spider-Man, leaving Deadpool to mock the characters, MST3K-style.

Check out a couple of pages from the original (from 1966)...

Then see those old pages through a new light (from 1997)...

Classic stuff.

Deadpool and Cable were stuck in a forced partnership for a while and it was during that series that writer Fabian Nicieza really started to have Deadpool break the fourth wall with some regularity. Writer Daniel Way then used Deadpool as a character in his Wolver Origins series, which was a "mature readers" title and it was Way who established that Deadpool worked really well as a "mature readers" character and he soon launched an ongoing series under that approach.

Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan followed suit with a similar approach. The title was relaunched with Duggan being the sole writer. Like the best Deadpool writers, Duggan balanced the humor with the darker side of Wade. He's your prototypical "tears of a clown" type guy - laughing to hide all of his pain (dude got his healing powers but not before his whole body was permanently covered with tumors!).

This approach was a key aspect of the hero getting his own blockbuster film series, which became the most successful R-rated superhero film series ever. Deadpool is about to be launched into a brand-new series by Kelly Thompson and Chria Bachalo that will likely be great, as well.

9. Magneto – 1192 points (17 first place votes)

We're all familiar with the concept of retconning comic books. You know, when you retroactively go back into an old story and say that something wasn't what it looked like. To wit, Jean Grey did not become Phoenix, there was this cosmic entity called Phoenix that PRETENDED to be Jean Grey. Stuff like that.

With Magneto, though, you often get the much more hilarious retconning ACTUAL HISTORY. Asked about Magneto years after he and Jack Kirby created the character, Stan Lee often pretended as though he always intended to have Magneto be like what Chris Claremont did with the character later on. Lee said that he never saw Magneto as a villain back then.

In Magneto's second appearance, in X-Men #4, where he leads the Brotherhood of EVIL Mutants, Magneto tries to take over a South American country. When the X-Men foil his plan, he decided to NUKE THE ISLAND AND ALL OF ITS RESIDENTS! But no, Lee didn't intend for the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to be a bad guy.

And that's not even the extent of all of Magneto's villainy in Stan Lee-penned issues.

Anyhow, let's take a look at Magneto's back story.

Born Max Eisenhardt, a German Jew, Eisenhardt's family was caught up in the Holocaust and tragically all save Max were executed. Max escaped and married a Roma woman named Magda. They eventually settled in Ukraine with their daughter, Anya, and Magda became pregnant with twins. However, Max (now going by "Magnus," because I assume that he thought it sounded more pretentious) missed out on a memo sent to him earlier that this is a world that hates and fears mutants, so when he used his powers publicly in a fit of anger, he unknowingly set events into motion that would end his daughter's life. Upon arriving to his home, he saw that an angry mob had set in on fire. The mob prevented him from saving his daughter from the fire. Naturally, he sort of snapped and killed the lot of them and destroyed much of the town. Magda, also naturally, was extremely scared and ran away.

Magnus went to go find her. With the intent to confuse future generations into thinking he was Roma for some reason, Magnus had someone create a new identity for him, Erik Lensherr. He never found his wife.

Eventually Erik mellowed out a bit and hung out with this nifty bald dude named Charlie. However, sadly one day while they working on a car, Xavier remarked that they had to fix the magneto inside the engine. Erik shouted, "That's it! I'll be a psycho evil villain named Magneto! Thank you, Charles! I am off!"

From that point on, Erik became known as Magneto.

As I mentioned above, he did lots of crazy stuff. Eventually, though, we learned that he had very low blood sugar, so when he would eat too many Twinkies, he would get sort of crazy (hey, it's as believable as anything else!). He had just finished four boxes of Twinkies when he thought it would be a cool idea to call up every nation on Earth and tell them that they had to make him the total ruler of Earth. This, naturally, is a declaration of war, and the Soviet Union responded by sending a submarine to shoot nukes at him. Bad idea, Russkies!! Magneto stopped the nukes and then destroyed the submarine in retaliation to the Russians' retaliation.

Xavier never gave up on Magneto, though, trying to woo him to the side of good during God Loves, Man Kills...

Eventually, Xavier convinces Magneto to try being a good guy, and luckily through a good lawyer, they were able to convince everyone that since Magneto had been de-aged awhile back (through various wacky shenanigans), he was, in effect, already "dead" so those past crimes didn't count. The UN must have been eating a lot of Twinkies themselves because they agreed with this ludicrous notion.

So Magneto was now a free man and just in time for Xavier to entrust him his entire school! Naturally, with Magneto not being very adept at things that did not involve destroying stuff, the school fell apart very quickly. The X-Men seemingly all died and the New Mutants all ran away from school to join a paramilitary cult. Well done, Magneto!

Magneto eventually did get one member of the X-Men to trust him, the easily duped Rogue. They had a team-up where she ended up figuring out at the end that Magneto was a little too much on the "kill the pizza delivery man for being late" side of things, so she broke it off with him.

Magneto and the X-Men had a couple more back and forths, a lot of "I'm right!" "No, you're not, I'm right!" stuff. Eventually, Xavier just got tired of it all and wiped Magneto's mind. Magneto's mind had so much evil in it, though, that it ended up merging with Xavier's own pervy thoughts and created a monster that almost destroyed the Marvel Universe!!

Magneto ended up taking over the mutant island of Genosha. And when the mutants on the island were all cured of the Legacy Virus, he was going to lead them on an invasion of the rest of the planet. The X-Men stopped him, though, with a pretty weak lineup. Crippled from this attack, Magneto was just chilling when Xavier's evil twin sister destroyed almost all of Genosha.

This inspired Magneto to get his final revenge on Xavier by secretly taking control of Xavier's own school right from underneath his eyes! To achieve this, Magneto used his powers to pretend to be this new mutant called Xorn (really, it's amazing the kind of things Magneto is able to do). However, Magneto was under the sway of a drug he got addicted to (he used it to make his powers stronger - he was still rehabilitating from Wolverine crippling him) and he ended up being even crazier than his old days!!

Eventually, he revealed himself and the X-Men stopped him, but not before he killed Jean Grey. He was then killed by Wolverine.

However, this was all in the midst of a time when Magneto's daughter (one of many) Scarlet Witch was being all crazy. So she altered reality so that not only was Magneto still alive, but no one even thought that he was Xorn (hey, it's just as believable as the story they actually went with that Xorn pretended to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn)! Magneto began hanging out with his old pal Charles Xavier on the ruins of Genosha. When Scarlet Witch went officially nuts, Magneto went and got her and took care of her. Eventually a bunch of X-Men and Avengers came to deal with her and Magneto's son Quicksilver asked the Scarlet Witch to create a world where mutants were in charge! Magneto became the King of the United States! The heroes rebelled from this, and Scarlet Witch ended up getting rid of all mutants. By "all mutants," I, of course, mean very few mutants. Magneto was one of them.

However, naturally enough, he got his powers back and tried to help fix the mutant race alongside the High Evolutionary. He then showed up at the X-Men's home and said, "hey, let me be on the team, please." And they said yes, because they don't always make good decisions.

Magneto was one of the heroes who remained on Cyclops' side after Cyclops became a bit of a fugitive following the events of Avengers vs. X-Men. Magneto formed a few of his own X-Men teams, one was a sort of hit squad taking care of threats against mutants before they could occur and then, once mutants were safe to exist on Earth (following some nonsense with Terrigen Mists), Magneto led a team featuring the time-displaced original X-Men.

Most recently, Magneto has fully embraced the new approach of the X-Men on Krakoa, working alongside his old friend, Charles Xavier, once more.

8. Doctor Doom – 1363 points (15 first place votes)

Doctor Doom, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is that rare villain who is basically as much a part of the comic as any of the superheroes in the book. Doom is basically the fifth member of the Fantastic Four, only he's super evil.

Victor Von Doom met Reed Richards in college, where the two were academic rivals, but Doom's drive to be the best literally blew up in his face when his face was scarred by a faulty experiment he was working on.

Doom ended up wearing a metal mask to hide his scars (I like Byrne's take on it, that the experiment only slightly scarred him, but it was wearing the mask before it cooled that REALLY scarred him), and soon took over Latveria, the Eastern European country where he was born.

Doom was a tyrant, but brought technology to the people and made Latveria one of the strongest countries in the world.

However, Doom could not keep from trying to both A. Conquer the world and B. Show up Reed Richards, who he hates, like, a LOT.

It is funny - Doom is always trying to prove he is so smart. The dude invented a TIME MACHINE!!! How awesome is THAT? And yet he still feels like he has to prove himself.

During Secret Wars, Doom took over the power of the Beyonders and remade reality in an attempt to show that he could be the big hero, but he did a bad job at it and had to admit that Reed Richards would be better at it. So Reed took over the power and put reality back to normal, but in the process, he also gave Doom a fresh start, healing his scars and letting him try to redeem himself. Doom briefly really tried to be a hero, even sort of becoming a replacement for Iron Man after Tony Stark was seemingly killed.

Doom just couldn't keep from going back to his old self.

7. Iron Man – 1499 points (24 first place votes)

Created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Don Heck, billionaire Tony Stark was forced to help create a suit of armor when his heart was damaged on a visit to Asia. With the artificial pacemaker the only thing keeping him alive, Stark figured he might as well do some good with it, so made a more advanced suit of armor, which he used to fight crime.

Passing himself (Iron Man) off as his own bodyguard, Stark kept on keeping on, even helping co-found the Avengers, where he served for many years. Tony Stark briefly had a major problem with alcoholism.

One of the more memorable Iron Man storylines was when he decided to support a Superhero Registration Act, leading to the events that became known as "Civil War." At the end of the event, Tony became the head of SHIELD. However, it all fell apart and Tony had to go on the run and sort of reboot his own memory, expunging the whole "Civil War" part of his life.

Tony was later given a chance to redeem himself by being on the other end of a second Civil War conflict, this time standing against Captain Marvel's attempts to use an Inhuman who could seemingly tell the future to stop crime before it happened. Tony found this unethical and tried to fight for literally the future. He was seemingly killed while doing so, but he eventually returned.

Tony's life is in danger once more as we get closer to 2020, a year where we had learned years ago that Arno Stark was destined to become Iron Man 2020.