Well, I couldn't have made a list without the newly-crowned King of the Nerds, could I? Along with creating zeitgeist-defining shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and cult classics like Firefly, Joss Whedon is a huge comics aficionado and has been writing for the medium on and off since Buffy made the leap from small screen to smaller page. Whedon has written several books for Marvel, most famously his 24-issue run on Astonishing X-Men with artist John Cassaday which focused on Colossus and Kitty Pryde, a character who had a huge influence on the creation of Buffy. He's also the second writer to take on Runaways after Brian K. Vaughan and has created his own books: notably Fray, a Buffy spin-off centered on a slayer living 200 years in the future; and Sugarshock, an energetic, music-centric comic about a band who hate Vikings. Canonical continuations of both Buffy and Angel are currently being published by Dark Horse and are occasionally written by Whedon. It goes without saying that Joss Whedon's partly responsible for the current landscape of comic book movies, but his influence stretches even further back as he was initially hired to write the first X-Men movie (one of his only lines to survive was Storm's infamous "what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning?" line) and the premise of his first Astonishing X-Men storyline, "Gifted", was partially adapted for X-Men: The Last Stand. And, of course, his team of movie Avengers is the current standard for Marvel's assembly of books - though I suspect that's less to do with Whedon and more to to with the powers that be...
