I don't know if anyone has nominated her yet but Kelly Sue Deconnick for being the vanguard of Marvel's outreach into a new market with her Captain Marvel series, as well as writing two of the better creator owned series in recent memory - Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet.
I'll add a vote for Rick Remender in case he still needs one
Hey, because I'm in charge, I'm going to second Geoff Johns, Eric Shanower, Brandon Graham, Jeff Lemire, Kelly Sue Deconnick, Greg Rucka and Keith Giffen. What's that? Oh, I had no idea they all had two nominations. No, I hadn't considered expanding this to anyone who had only received two nominations, why do you ask?
I think we get a break with the Best Event category, as there are a few clear favorites and a lot of chaff, but yeah, I'm not surprised it's getting harder.
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UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
Oof, that was a rough choice, as evidenced by Fraction barely sneaking into my ballot and Hickman not getting on at all
Gillen was #1 (obviously), and BKV was #2. Both are writers where I hard pressed to think of anything they've done that I haven't enjoyed, but ultimately I love Journey Into Mystery more than Runaways, so Gillen took it. Bendis was third entirely on the strength of USM. There has never been a comic as consistently excellent as far as I'm concerned, the highs aren't quite as high as some of Gillen's and Vaughn's work, but within USM and Miles's series that followed, there are essentially no lows.
James Roberts took 4th for making my cry over giant robot romance and for some of the most masterful foreshadowing/long con storytelling I've ever read.
Matt Fraction gets 5th because IIF and Hawkeye are some fun fuckin comics.
I'm going to second what probably seems like a super easy choice Bendis
Even if you ignore every other of his work, just what he's done with USM is worthy of nomination and probably unequal.
USM has consistently been good to great since issue 1 and has weathered all the changes in Ultimate Universe. Bendis gets his share of very fair complaints, but the voice he found for Peter was 100% on.
And then of course came Miles. I really do think that Miles is in the cusp of breaking out as a HUGE character, and in a decade or so people are going to be referring to him as their Spider-Man.
Oof, that was a rough choice, as evidenced by Fraction barely sneaking into my ballot and Hickman not getting on at all
Gillen was #1 (obviously), and BKV was #2. Both are writers where I hard pressed to think of anything they've done that I haven't enjoyed, but ultimately I love Journey Into Mystery more than Runaways, so Gillen took it. Bendis was third entirely on the strength of USM. There has never been a comic as consistently excellent as far as I'm concerned, the highs aren't quite as high as some of Gillen's and Vaughn's work, but within USM and Miles's series that followed, there are essentially no lows.
James Roberts took 4th for making my cry over giant robot romance and for some of the most masterful foreshadowing/long con storytelling I've ever read.
Matt Fraction gets 5th because IIF and Hawkeye are some fun fuckin comics.
Oh goddammit, Roberts was in the poll and I missed his name.
AGH!
FUCK ME!
AGGGGGH!
I'm sorry, Brian Clevinger, but Roberts should have gotten your spot.
This dude took a Rob Liefeld creation and turned it into something great. He should probably get his own trophy for that.
17) Brian Clevinger (27 pts)
He finally closed his run on 8-Bit Theater and launched a pretty successful comic that wasn’t sprite art and Final Fantasy jokes. Pretty good decade, IMO.
16) James Roberts (28 pts)
The Transformers fan contingent appears to have missed out on this poll, or I’d have assumed Roberts would be higher. By all accounts his work on that franchise has been spectacular.
14) Kelly Sue Deconnick (31 pts)
14) Charles Soule (31 pts)
Charles Soule wrote roughly five hundred issues over the past two years, which is even more impressive when he managed to keep all of them up to a pretty level of quality. Kelly Sue Deconnick helped launch a movement when she helped push Carol Danvers to Marvel’s A-list, and she created something called Bitch Planet, which, even when you set aside the groundbreaking quality of the story itself, is just a tremendous name.
13) Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (43 pts)
The stewards of Marvel’s cosmic comics for a large chunk of this decade, Abnett & Lanning breathed new life into this forum’s team of the decade, and
their run helped inspire one of the MCU’s more surprising success stories in Guardians of the Galaxy.
12) Rick Remender (44 pts)
I’m looking at a list of the stuff Remender’s done over the past 10 years, and it’s honestly stunning that he finished outside of the top ten. But then, it’s hard to argue that anyone ahead of him doesn’t deserve to be there. So I’ll chalk this up to the fact that there are an absurd number of quality writers out there, right now.
11) Mark Waid (49 pts)
Speaking of which, here’s Mark Waid, also outside of the top ten, despite his fantastic work on Daredevil and, you know, all of the other awesome work Mark Waid is constantly producing. Like I said. This is absurd.
Ed Brubaker resurrected Bucky, killed Steve Rogers, resurrected Steve Rogers, and left Marvel to make a bunch of rad creator-owned comics. And that’s a very brief overview of what he did in the past ten years. Oh, and he helped push me into watching Veronica Mars. So, A+ work, Mr. Brubaker.
9) G. Willow Wilson (56 pts)
She’s got a shorter resume than a lot of the people on this list, but in helping to create Kamala Khan, she had a hand in launching one of the most influential and important new superheroes in a long time. Kamala ran away with the top spot on our Best New Character poll, and so much of what makes Kamala so compelling comes from Wilson’s unique voice. She’s already lined up to do more Marvel work soon, so it looks like the next decade might be even better.
7) Jason Aaron (57 pts)
Aaron launched Scalped, had a terrific run on Wolverine, and then, in a move that could have blown up spectacularly, put Wolverine in charge of a school, filling it with a bunch of new characters, playing with X-Men history in a spectacularly fun, compelling series. Oh, and he launched the most metal version of Thor that’s ever been put to paper.
7) Warren Ellis (57 pts)
Not many writers have had an output as varied as Warren had over the past ten years. He was already an established industry vet in 2005, and he used that status to bounce from the Ultimate universe to Nextwave, to novels and webcomics and then back to a really cool Moon Knight series that almost makes up for Nextwave.
6) Brian Michael Bendis (61 pts)
Bendis has had a hand in virtually every major Marvel event for the past ten years, and has written both of Marvel’s premier teams, in the X-Men and the Avengers. But it’s his smaller scale work on Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil that’s likely to define his legacy, and with good reason. He also wrote Powers, which got its own dang TV show that you can only watch on a Playstation, which is weird. Anyways, he closed the decade by scoring the part of the Kingpin in Netflix’s Daredevil series.
5) Grant Morrison (82 pts)
Morrison created one of this forum’s favorite new characters in Damien Wayne, blew up the Batman mythos, and also he did We3. His most universally loved work of the past decade has to be All-Star Superman, though, a comic that paid homage to wacky silver age Superman stories, while including powerful, human moments throughout. At his best, Morrison is able to balance insane story concepts with emotional, moving character work, and All-Star Superman is the best possible example of that.
4) Brian K. Vaughan (121 pts)
BKV started the decade with Runaways, Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, which is a pretty goddamned great trio of comics. Then he went to TV for a while, where he worked on Lost, and things that aren’t Lost that I don’t care about because they aren’t Lost, and then he came back to comics in a huge way with Saga, a sprawling, yet grounded, space epic that quickly became a critical and commercial hit. Hell of way to bookend an arbitrarily defined ten year period.
3) Kieron Gillen (180 pts)
When he’s not making incredibly awful puns on Twitter, Kieron is writing some of the most thought provoking comics on the market, comics that push the boundaries of how comics tell stories while keeping a strong focus on character. His work on Journey Into Mystery is one of the more amazing sustained run in comics, leading to an ending which stretches the fourth wall to the breaking point while telling an incredibly emotional, incredibly personal story. Then there’s his creator-owned stuff like the Wicked & the Divine and Phonogram, and…pretty good decade, awful puns aside.
2) Matt Fraction (215 pts)
Fun fact: Matt Fraction actually appeared on the most brackets of anyone in this poll. Keep that in mind when you see how many points the top writer scored. Anyways, it’s hard to overestimate just how many significant books Fraction had over the course of the decade. There was the Immortal Iron Fist, which officially marked him as a writer to watch. There was a solid run with the X-Men. And then…there was Hawkeye, a comic that immediately established itself as something different and incredible, and something that spawned a new wave of comics like Superior Foes of Spider-Man, all aiming for that same tone. And then there’s Sex Criminals, which has surpassed all possible expectations to become one of the best comic books available.
1) Jonathan Hickman (320 pts)
Hickman received 23 first place votes. The next highest total? 10. Hickman grabbed the lead early and set out to remove any sort of doubt in this contest. And for good reason. Hickman had an all-time great run on Fantastic Four, a laundry list of great indie titles, and a comic in which famous historical figures staredown Galactus. And, since the launch of Marvel Now, he has sheparded the Avengers and all of the Marvel Universe towards the biggest event Marvel has had in years. He tells massive, complex stories, but never really loses sight of the people caught up in events much bigger than they are. And he writes one of the best Dooms ever.
Yah, knew it would be the top 3, no contest, it's not that the others are bad, it's just that Gillen, Fraction, and Hickman are so freaking prolific with quality writing; only Soule surpasses them in the quantity front that I'm aware of, and he's a damned practicing lawyer.
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Well, some of that is that they've done some of their best work very recently. Hickman's in the midst of the highest profile work of his career (and hitting the climax), Fraction's Hawkeye is still, technically going, and Gillen's Journey Into Mystery is very recent.
Not that they don't deserve their placement, but I think that's why the separation is as wide as it is.
Well, some of that is that they've done some of their best work very recently. Hickman's in the midst of the highest profile work of his career (and hitting the climax), Fraction's Hawkeye is still, technically going, and Gillen's Journey Into Mystery is very recent.
Not that they don't deserve their placement, but I think that's why the separation is as wide as it is.
Honestly I believe that's why Bendis didn't place any hire. The dudes infront of him are on fire right now.
But save for Hickman, Bendis run on Ultimate Spider-Man has just been consistently A+ work and easily rivals the guys who placed ahead of him.
But singing it's praises would be met with a, "Yes LeBron is the best player in basketball we KNOW this already god" so it's easy to take it for granted the best run on Spider-Man since the character's inception.
I feel like you could rearrange the top ten in any order, and I'd still nod my head in agreement. Some great creators putting out objectively great work (though obviously subjectively I like some more than others).
I gotta be honest, I used to really like Fraction's stuff, but then some of his more recent writing (I'm thinking specifically of Iron Man and Thor) really turned me off. "World's Most Wanted", in particular, may be the most disappointing storyline of the decade for me. To be fair, I haven't read I haven't read his most most recent stuff. Anyway, the dude obviously was and is a fantastic writer, just that some of his stuff didn't work for me.
His best work is still "The Annotated Mantooth", though. The "Citizen Kane" of comics.
I feel like you could rearrange the top ten in any order, and I'd still nod my head in agreement. Some great creators putting out objectively great work (though obviously subjectively I like some more than others).
I gotta be honest, I used to really like Fraction's stuff, but then some of his more recent writing (I'm thinking specifically of Iron Man and Thor) really turned me off. "World's Most Wanted", in particular, may be the most disappointing storyline of the decade for me. To be fair, I haven't read I haven't read his most most recent stuff. Anyway, the dude obviously was and is a fantastic writer, just that some of his stuff didn't work for me.
His best work is still "The Annotated Mantooth", though. The "Citizen Kane" of comics.
Sex Criminals is really good, and I appreciate that he's trying to pick up Brandon Graham's Prophet torch with ODY-C, even if it hasn't clicked with me yet. There's a story to be told about his latter years at Marvel, as the quality of his non-Hawkeye stuff dipped to the point that his Inhumans work never even made it into print. Shockingly for the comics industry, there's been little or no real gossip about what happened there and why.
Well, some of that is that they've done some of their best work very recently. Hickman's in the midst of the highest profile work of his career (and hitting the climax), Fraction's Hawkeye is still, technically going, and Gillen's Journey Into Mystery is very recent.
Not that they don't deserve their placement, but I think that's why the separation is as wide as it is.
Honestly I believe that's why Bendis didn't place any hire. The dudes infront of him are on fire right now.
But save for Hickman, Bendis run on Ultimate Spider-Man has just been consistently A+ work and easily rivals the guys who placed ahead of him.
But singing it's praises would be met with a, "Yes LeBron is the best player in basketball we KNOW this already god" so it's easy to take it for granted the best run on Spider-Man since the character's inception.
His Daredevil is just as good as his Ultimate Spider-man.
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I'll add a vote for Rick Remender in case he still needs one
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Gillen was #1 (obviously), and BKV was #2. Both are writers where I hard pressed to think of anything they've done that I haven't enjoyed, but ultimately I love Journey Into Mystery more than Runaways, so Gillen took it. Bendis was third entirely on the strength of USM. There has never been a comic as consistently excellent as far as I'm concerned, the highs aren't quite as high as some of Gillen's and Vaughn's work, but within USM and Miles's series that followed, there are essentially no lows.
James Roberts took 4th for making my cry over giant robot romance and for some of the most masterful foreshadowing/long con storytelling I've ever read.
Matt Fraction gets 5th because IIF and Hawkeye are some fun fuckin comics.
Even if you ignore every other of his work, just what he's done with USM is worthy of nomination and probably unequal.
USM has consistently been good to great since issue 1 and has weathered all the changes in Ultimate Universe. Bendis gets his share of very fair complaints, but the voice he found for Peter was 100% on.
And then of course came Miles. I really do think that Miles is in the cusp of breaking out as a HUGE character, and in a decade or so people are going to be referring to him as their Spider-Man.
Oh goddammit, Roberts was in the poll and I missed his name.
AGH!
FUCK ME!
AGGGGGH!
I'm sorry, Brian Clevinger, but Roberts should have gotten your spot.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
I'm sure the results will be very interesting.
I thought i didnt know that much about writers until i had to vote for my favorite and didnt have enough spots for all of them!
26) Keith Giffen (1 pts)
Poor Keith. Help revive Marvel’s cosmic scene, and all you get in return is a single fifth place vote. Sorry Keith.
25) Eric Shanower (3 pts)
Someone liked Oz comics enough to give this man a third place vote
23) Geoff Johns (8 pts)
23) Jeff Lemire (8 pts)
Here’s a couple guys who have done some work on guys with Green in their name. Not pink. Shut your mouth.
22) Peter David (12 pts)
I assume he’s this low because he tried to trick people into liking Gambit again. Don’t fall for it, people. Gambit is terrible.
21) Greg Rucka (14 pts)
That someone like Greg Rucka is sitting at 21st should speak to the overall quality of the writers on this list.
20) Garth Ennis (15 pts)
Gonna be honest, kinda drawing a blank on what he actually wrote in the past ten years.
19) Chris Giarrusso (16 pts)
Sorry, @texiken , looks like the dream is dead.
18) Brandon Graham (19 pts)
This dude took a Rob Liefeld creation and turned it into something great. He should probably get his own trophy for that.
17) Brian Clevinger (27 pts)
He finally closed his run on 8-Bit Theater and launched a pretty successful comic that wasn’t sprite art and Final Fantasy jokes. Pretty good decade, IMO.
16) James Roberts (28 pts)
The Transformers fan contingent appears to have missed out on this poll, or I’d have assumed Roberts would be higher. By all accounts his work on that franchise has been spectacular.
14) Kelly Sue Deconnick (31 pts)
14) Charles Soule (31 pts)
Charles Soule wrote roughly five hundred issues over the past two years, which is even more impressive when he managed to keep all of them up to a pretty level of quality. Kelly Sue Deconnick helped launch a movement when she helped push Carol Danvers to Marvel’s A-list, and she created something called Bitch Planet, which, even when you set aside the groundbreaking quality of the story itself, is just a tremendous name.
13) Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (43 pts)
The stewards of Marvel’s cosmic comics for a large chunk of this decade, Abnett & Lanning breathed new life into this forum’s team of the decade, and
their run helped inspire one of the MCU’s more surprising success stories in Guardians of the Galaxy.
12) Rick Remender (44 pts)
I’m looking at a list of the stuff Remender’s done over the past 10 years, and it’s honestly stunning that he finished outside of the top ten. But then, it’s hard to argue that anyone ahead of him doesn’t deserve to be there. So I’ll chalk this up to the fact that there are an absurd number of quality writers out there, right now.
11) Mark Waid (49 pts)
Speaking of which, here’s Mark Waid, also outside of the top ten, despite his fantastic work on Daredevil and, you know, all of the other awesome work Mark Waid is constantly producing. Like I said. This is absurd.
10) Ed Brubaker (52 pts)
Ed Brubaker resurrected Bucky, killed Steve Rogers, resurrected Steve Rogers, and left Marvel to make a bunch of rad creator-owned comics. And that’s a very brief overview of what he did in the past ten years. Oh, and he helped push me into watching Veronica Mars. So, A+ work, Mr. Brubaker.
9) G. Willow Wilson (56 pts)
She’s got a shorter resume than a lot of the people on this list, but in helping to create Kamala Khan, she had a hand in launching one of the most influential and important new superheroes in a long time. Kamala ran away with the top spot on our Best New Character poll, and so much of what makes Kamala so compelling comes from Wilson’s unique voice. She’s already lined up to do more Marvel work soon, so it looks like the next decade might be even better.
7) Jason Aaron (57 pts)
Aaron launched Scalped, had a terrific run on Wolverine, and then, in a move that could have blown up spectacularly, put Wolverine in charge of a school, filling it with a bunch of new characters, playing with X-Men history in a spectacularly fun, compelling series. Oh, and he launched the most metal version of Thor that’s ever been put to paper.
7) Warren Ellis (57 pts)
Not many writers have had an output as varied as Warren had over the past ten years. He was already an established industry vet in 2005, and he used that status to bounce from the Ultimate universe to Nextwave, to novels and webcomics and then back to a really cool Moon Knight series that almost makes up for Nextwave.
6) Brian Michael Bendis (61 pts)
Bendis has had a hand in virtually every major Marvel event for the past ten years, and has written both of Marvel’s premier teams, in the X-Men and the Avengers. But it’s his smaller scale work on Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil that’s likely to define his legacy, and with good reason. He also wrote Powers, which got its own dang TV show that you can only watch on a Playstation, which is weird. Anyways, he closed the decade by scoring the part of the Kingpin in Netflix’s Daredevil series.
5) Grant Morrison (82 pts)
Morrison created one of this forum’s favorite new characters in Damien Wayne, blew up the Batman mythos, and also he did We3. His most universally loved work of the past decade has to be All-Star Superman, though, a comic that paid homage to wacky silver age Superman stories, while including powerful, human moments throughout. At his best, Morrison is able to balance insane story concepts with emotional, moving character work, and All-Star Superman is the best possible example of that.
4) Brian K. Vaughan (121 pts)
BKV started the decade with Runaways, Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, which is a pretty goddamned great trio of comics. Then he went to TV for a while, where he worked on Lost, and things that aren’t Lost that I don’t care about because they aren’t Lost, and then he came back to comics in a huge way with Saga, a sprawling, yet grounded, space epic that quickly became a critical and commercial hit. Hell of way to bookend an arbitrarily defined ten year period.
3) Kieron Gillen (180 pts)
When he’s not making incredibly awful puns on Twitter, Kieron is writing some of the most thought provoking comics on the market, comics that push the boundaries of how comics tell stories while keeping a strong focus on character. His work on Journey Into Mystery is one of the more amazing sustained run in comics, leading to an ending which stretches the fourth wall to the breaking point while telling an incredibly emotional, incredibly personal story. Then there’s his creator-owned stuff like the Wicked & the Divine and Phonogram, and…pretty good decade, awful puns aside.
2) Matt Fraction (215 pts)
Fun fact: Matt Fraction actually appeared on the most brackets of anyone in this poll. Keep that in mind when you see how many points the top writer scored. Anyways, it’s hard to overestimate just how many significant books Fraction had over the course of the decade. There was the Immortal Iron Fist, which officially marked him as a writer to watch. There was a solid run with the X-Men. And then…there was Hawkeye, a comic that immediately established itself as something different and incredible, and something that spawned a new wave of comics like Superior Foes of Spider-Man, all aiming for that same tone. And then there’s Sex Criminals, which has surpassed all possible expectations to become one of the best comic books available.
1) Jonathan Hickman (320 pts)
Hickman received 23 first place votes. The next highest total? 10. Hickman grabbed the lead early and set out to remove any sort of doubt in this contest. And for good reason. Hickman had an all-time great run on Fantastic Four, a laundry list of great indie titles, and a comic in which famous historical figures staredown Galactus. And, since the launch of Marvel Now, he has sheparded the Avengers and all of the Marvel Universe towards the biggest event Marvel has had in years. He tells massive, complex stories, but never really loses sight of the people caught up in events much bigger than they are. And he writes one of the best Dooms ever.
Also: belated thanks to everyone for not nominating Kirkman.
pretty pleased that Gillen beat GMo though.
(I was genuinely worried Hickman was going to lose 1st place somehow)
He was writing Punisher stories up until 2009 or so
also Crossed and The Boys
It's really good stuff, guys!
But God damn man, he deserves it
That arc of Fantastic Four alone is enough to put him at the top of my list
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Trillium rules
Saga and Runaways are so good.
Why I fear the ocean.
Not that they don't deserve their placement, but I think that's why the separation is as wide as it is.
Also JLA/Hitman and Fury: My War Gone By.
Honestly I believe that's why Bendis didn't place any hire. The dudes infront of him are on fire right now.
But save for Hickman, Bendis run on Ultimate Spider-Man has just been consistently A+ work and easily rivals the guys who placed ahead of him.
But singing it's praises would be met with a, "Yes LeBron is the best player in basketball we KNOW this already god" so it's easy to take it for granted the best run on Spider-Man since the character's inception.
I gotta be honest, I used to really like Fraction's stuff, but then some of his more recent writing (I'm thinking specifically of Iron Man and Thor) really turned me off. "World's Most Wanted", in particular, may be the most disappointing storyline of the decade for me. To be fair, I haven't read I haven't read his most most recent stuff. Anyway, the dude obviously was and is a fantastic writer, just that some of his stuff didn't work for me.
His best work is still "The Annotated Mantooth", though. The "Citizen Kane" of comics.
Sex Criminals is really good, and I appreciate that he's trying to pick up Brandon Graham's Prophet torch with ODY-C, even if it hasn't clicked with me yet. There's a story to be told about his latter years at Marvel, as the quality of his non-Hawkeye stuff dipped to the point that his Inhumans work never even made it into print. Shockingly for the comics industry, there's been little or no real gossip about what happened there and why.
There was a time I would have nominated Kirkman.
It was maybe 4 or 5 years ago
His Daredevil is just as good as his Ultimate Spider-man.