The following have their own pages:
Image Comics specialized in these for as long as the fad lasted.
- Spawn, quite possibly the most popular Nineties Anti-Hero. Edgy one-word name, grim-n-gritty Backstory (an assassinated mercenary damned to Hell and sent back as a soldier of Satan), killing bad guys who were slightly worse than him, and written and drawn by Todd McFarlane. The character became less of a typical example of this trope as the series went on, however. The first issue of Spawn had a little parody of the trope, with TV Talking Heads commenting that while the spikes and chains are "totally gauche", trying to bring back capes is a bad idea.
- The Darkness and Witchblade both exemplified this trope. The former is a former mafia hitman who becomes a living vessel of the world's dark energies, complete with an army of flippant, happy-go-lucky demons who delight in every opportunity to torture someone; the second is a pornolicious detective with lethal powers which rip her clothes off whenever she uses them.
- The former, however, is a Reconstruction of this trope, since he's much more subtle and complex than many other examples.
- Youngblood (Image Comics) by Rob Liefeld. Initially playing this trope as straight as an arrow, later runs thoroughly deconstructed the people that would be part of such a team, as well as the public’s perception of them, with the 2017 run making the public’s hatred of Youngblood (a few members excluded) a key plot point.
- Shadowhawk was an Image Comics title about a successful, scrupulously honest African-American attorney who refused to fix a case for an organized crime outfit and, in revenge, was kidnapped by them and dumped after being given an injection of the AIDS virus... which prompted him, in a fit of rage and desire to try and make some sense out of the world, to don exoskeletal armor and start brutalizing thugs as a vaguely Batmanish vigilante. The suits got more and more elaborate as the disease took its toll, to help compensate for his weakness, but he ended up dying of the disease anyway. Apparently even series creator Jim Valentino hated the character, and killed him off purely out of spite. Why he even bothered with the whole affair in the first place is anyone's guess. That may be why the second Shadowhawk ended up so... different.
- Supreme, who eventually moved from a Nineties Anti-Hero ripoff of Superman into an affectionate homage to the Silver Age Superman (largely because Alan Moore took control of the character).
Other
- Valiant Comics had a number of Nineties Anti-Heroes.
- Bloodshot: Mobster Angelo Mortalli was framed by the Carboni crime family, forcing him to become a witness for the state. While under Federal protection, Mortalli was betrayed by his protectors and sold to Hideyoshi Iwatsu to become a test subject for Project Rising Spirit.
- H.A.R.D. Corps: A group of Vietnam veterans who were revived from comas by a corporation who fits them with brain implants that give them psionic powers, and explodes if they're killed or caught. One of them dies in every other issue, so they're always being replaced.
- Pretty much everyone in Dark Age arc of Astro City, as one might expect in a deconstruction of The Dark Age of Comic Books.
- The Pale Horseman incinerates all criminals, whether it's murderers or shoplifting kids.
- Gloo is a mindless Blob Monster that fights crime by pulling "pranks" on its targets — such as spraying flesh-melting "seltzer" or jamming eight Mooks into a subcompact car. And it treats armed robbery and littering as equivalent crimes...
- The Blue Knight is a skeletal vigilante who hunts down and kills anyone associated with the criminal underworld, whether it's a mob boss or a Mook fencing stolen goods. He is eventually succeeded by the Blue Knights, a squad of armed vigilantes.
- Stonecold is a murderous vigilante with rock-solid armor and knuckledusters.
- Subverted by Hellhound, one of the first Darker and Edgier heroes. Despite having the demonic background, monstrous appearance, torn leather and chains costume, and "edgy" name, is actually a Noble Demon who respected the Silver Agent and is friendly with the old-school heroes.
- By the end of "The Dark Age", the protagonists Charles and Royal Williams have become this in their obsessive quest to kill the man who murdered their parents.
- Joe Martin did a Deconstructive Parody of this in the one-shot comic book, Boffo in Hell, starring the two main characters from his newspaper comic strip, Mister Boffo (although everyone and everything except these two were drawn in a more-realistic, superhero style); the title was a reference to Spawn. In it, the government suspects that people are mean and violent because of self-esteem issues. As an experiment, they take a bunch of psychotics, give them a bunch of super-powers so that they'll feel "special" and then have them do community service among the public. Needless to say, it doesn't go as they planned. Earl Boffo, the dim-witted title character, winds up gaining super-powers of his own (with a Spawn-like appearance to match) and - completely by accident - manages to subdue and kill the murderous anti-heroes.
- The Doctor Who Magazine comic introduced a full-blown Nineties Anti-Hero to the Doctor Who universe in the shape of Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer. He's a "chainsword"-loving professional criminal and multiple murderer who was exiled by a future Earth society to a Dalek-occupied world to kill as many Daleks as possible before his inevitable death (although he turned out to be badass enough to survive). Of course, he first appeared in 1980 and in some ways was a deconstruction, so could be considered an Unbuilt Trope.
- Doom has the Doomguy going around and punching and/or shooting things... just because. He's also borderline psychopathic. What makes him stand out from the crowd is that he doesn't brood or snark, and is instead a Large Ham and a bit of a Boisterous Bruiser. It's oddly endearing, enough so that one of the most famous mods for the game itself is, in part, a Recursive Adaptation of the comic Doomguy's personality.
- Holy Terror: As one of the individuals who influenced the Dark Age of Comics, it was the natural evolution of Frank Miller that he would eventually create a Dark Age Anti-Hero of his own in the form of "The Fixer". He is a Blood Knight so psychopathic that even the darkest iterations of Batman (of which he is a Captain Ersatz, the story having been originally meant as a Batman story), including even those by Miller himself, would seem saintly by comparison. This is demonstrated with The Fixer's slaughter of the Al-Qaeda cell in the underground of Empire City with a multitude of guns, ranging from pistols to bazookas, as well as a chemical weapon of some sort (and yes, you read correctly). Granted, the setting tries to justify his methods in that he is fighting a terrorist group who is orchestrating an act of war, rather than the typical mobsters and other criminals that would be the purview of the justice system to try and punishnote and to what extent either the military and/or law enforcement should be involved in addressing terrorism is another matter..
- Johnny the Homicidal Maniac parodied both the male and female versions of this trope in one of its "Meanwhile" stories.
- Lady Death: She is a Stripperific Dark Action Girl with a BFS and the Legions of Hell at her back and call, who coincidentally first appeared in print in 1991.
- Marshal Law is an Anti-Hero who specializes in hunting heroes, though as he always says, "I haven't found any yet."
- Star Wars:
- After Dark Empire revealed that Boba Fett survived falling into the Sarlacc, Fett was given various one-shots and miniseries and basically acted like the Star Wars equivalent of this.
- Jedi Master Quinlan Vos' debut was in The Phantom Menace (just barely making the 90's cutoff) and was a textbook example with his appearances in Star Wars: Republic giving him a troubled backstory, a maverick personality with an excess of Dark Side aggression, a rad hairstyle, and a rather un-Jedi approach to warfare to the point he was even once literally advertised as a "Jedi with a gun". In Star Wars: The Clone Wars he experiences an Adaptational Personality Change into a Boisterous Bruiser, but falls back into this in Dark Disciple with his contact with the Dark Side presented as a tragedy instead of an edgy trait of badassery.
- Then there’s Luke Skywalker’s great-great-great grandson Cade in Star Wars: Legacy who other than when his books were published (from 2006 to 2010) fits this pretty well. He’s gritty, constantly pushing the edge of the Dark Side, and works as a bounty hunter for part of the story. He dates and trains with a Sith lady Twi’lek as well. He has few qualms about killing or playing dirty when he needs to, though he manages not to go full on villain and does finally pay attention to ghost-Luke’s warning about what will happen if he doesn’t do something about the One Sith Empire.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally like this: later versions made them more unambiguously heroic and less feral.
- The Turtles actually predate this as they came out in 1984. They were more of an Affectionate Parody of the sort of work that Frank Miller and Dave Sim were putting out at the time.
- Casey Jones was another parody. He was basically an angrier version of Raph if he didn't try to control his anger and he lacked the tragic backstory these characters generally have. Like the turtles, he also made his debut in The '80s.
- Warrior Nun Areala: "Shotgun" Mary Delacroix, who was created specifically to complement the protagonist Shannon Masters. Though Delacroix has many elements that other examples of the archetype (as can be read and seen here
) such as her disdain for authority (particularly the Catholic Church for its disapproval of homosexuality) and her preference for guns (with blessed bullets) to fight demons and other supernatural threats, she is a Lighter and Softer downplayed example and also a mild subversion in that she is more a Knight in Sour Armor rather than an Unscrupulous Hero In Name Only like others on this list. - In the Dark Horse Comics superhero line Comics Greatest World, X (Dark Horse Comics) filled this role. He was at least willing to give you one warning, a vertical slash across the face. If the X across your face or an image of your face was completed, however, he killed you. No exceptions. He was willing to do whatever it took to cleanse the city of Arcadia of its crime and corruption.
- The Tick: Big Shot, who also appeared in the animated series, was originally introduced as a one-off character in the comic as someone hanging out at the vigilante table in the superhero club. While other vigilantes had complicated backstories, Big Shot's reasons for being a gun-wielding vigilante? "I just like to kill people."
- This trope hit Transformers: Generation 2 hard. A lot of the Autobots came off as gung-ho and violent; some who were already Blood Knights, like Blades or the Dinobots, started killing downed opponents outright. Inexplicably, they also found ways to stick pouches and belts on robots, as well as redoing several of them with darker decos to be more grim and gritty—most notably, Sideswipe went from a red-painted Boisterous Bruiser to a black-painted example of this trope.
- Inspired by various anti-heroes on this list, Chilean vigilante Diablo is the Trope Codifier for Chilean comic books, wearing a Badass Longcoat and a Cool Mask with an Irisless Eye Mask Of Mystery, having plenty of guns, being accompanied by his devilish tutor and having pages full of Gorn, especially when he summons The Legions of Hell.
- The source of the page image is Blood Hunter, one such anti-hero who is also a vampire, from Brainstorm, one of the many independent publishers that emerged in the 90s. He first appeared in the indicatively titled Vamperotica, but his solo comic was a one-shot.
- 2000 AD:
- Judge Dredd, despite being a Judge, Jury, and Executioner working for a dystopian police state, is actually a subversion (or an Unbuilt Trope), since his character is much too layered beneath the gruff exterior to ever qualify as one. The judges of the Mega-Cities do have total power over life and death, but they're still genuinely cops, not mere tyrants, meaning they have to adhere to standards such as fairness and "the punishment must fit the crime". However, the way in which he's depicted in Heavy Metal Dredd (published in 1993) is a straight example. Metal Dredd solves every problem with his Lawgiver pistol, to the point where he'll happily blow the legs off jaywalkers or beat anyone who looks at him funny into a coma. If his version in the 2000 AD continuity was that much of a Rabid Cop, he would have already been executed by Internal Affairs for abuse of power.
- Another pre-90's example from 2000 AD would be Nemesis the Warlock, a brutal and demonic-looking alien Anti-Hero with esoteric powers, a gruff and misanthropic personality, a tragic background involving his dysfunctional family, and he leads a resistance against Torquemada's regime in a crapsack galaxy for selfish reasons instead of the freedom of the various alien species like a traditional Space Opera hero would do. However he's nowhere near as cruel as Torquemada and his inquisitors and terminators, and he slowly learns to care about Others thanks to Purity Brown. It helps that he's from the same creator as Marshal Law.
- Cyberfrog (1996) by Ethan Van Sciver is about a cybernetically-enhanced mutant frog who goes around violently murdering various criminals as well as alien menaces, such as a race of Wicked Wasps that want to invade the Earth to implant humans with their spawn. Think Earthworm Jim meet The Punisher.
- Men in Black has Wolf, formerly a man in black himself (Agent X), now a rogue superhero. The costume, Beast Man behavior and Non-Human Sidekick Peter don't help. There's also Agent K, who is far more willing to resort to unethical actions to keep humanity safe, which is a stark contrast to his characterization from the more popular movies.
- Vampirella started being depicted this way during the 90s. More emphasis was placed on her struggle with her Bloodlust, her already revealing outfit was drawn as even skimpier and she frequently came to blows with other heroes she crossed paths with before teaming up with them. Vampirella's friend, ally and occasional enemy, Pantha also fit this trope in the 90s; she wore a very revealing outfit just like Vampirella, had a vicious temper, was an Animal-Themed Superbeing, had Wolverine Claws and a tragic past of killing numerous people including her own son.
- The Simpsons irregularly featured issues of Radioactive Man, Bart's favourite superhero. In one, Radioactive Man's arch nemesis Doctor Crab created a set of clones and one of them returned as an over-the-top mockery of a Rob Liefeld designed character, bulging muscles, pouches and feet that are always blocked by the scenery and all. Radioactive Man commented that the clone was stronger, faster and more popular with both kids and marketing executives than him, alluding to the fact these kind of character were all the rage back then (the comic was actually published during The '90s). Then he decided the best way to deal with his phony was by summoning his lawyer who proceeded to sue the ripoff to oblivion for numerous copyright infringements.
- Knightwrath, first released in 2022, is a loving homage to mainstays of the genre like Spawn and Venom, featuring a former wimp who is transformed into a hulking monster after a near-death experience.
- Black Hammer parodied this in one issue. To "keep up with the times", the aging Golden Age superhero Abraham Slam commissions a new, armored costume straight out of the Dark Age, complete with bulky shoulder pads, numerous pouches, and a visor reminiscent of Judge Dredd. All these accessories just get in the way and make him look ridiculous, and after wearing the costume once he decides to never use it again.
