10 Best Comic Book Characters NOT From Marvel Or DC

10. X (Dark Horse Comics)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took the basic idea of Batman and brought it to about as logical an extreme as you can get?

What if the things everyone claims are problems with the idea of the Dark Knight - a masked white dude with too much time on his hands beating up the less fortunate and mentally ill - were intentionally incorporated into the character to make a point? Well for this psychotic little thought experiment, you turn to Dark Horse's X.

Created by Mike Richardson and Chris Warner, X is a superhero in the loosest sense of the term. The character's whole gimmick is that he gives criminals one chance at redemption after giving them one half of an X shaped scar. If they don't shift gears into a life of absolute sainthood, he gives them the other scar, and then kills them.

The character of X is fascinatingly insane and violent, particularly because we know nothing about the man under the mask. We see nothing of his personal life, and his mask has locks on it to prevent it from being taken off. Only a few have ever managed to see X's true face.

Unfortunately, those people aren't in a position to tell anyone what they saw, given that there isn't enough of them left to fill a shoebox.