12 Greatest Ever Comic Book Movie Anti-Heroes

9. The Punisher

The Punisher's success as a comic book character is something of an impossibility. On the face of it, the perpetually angry, muscle-bound bad-ass with an unfeasible armoury as big as the chip on his shoulder is an anachronism, belonging to a time when Arnie and Sly Stallone were cutting out careers as large, wronged men with a death-wish and the smell of revenge in their nostrils. He was actually designed in similar terms (though in the 70s rather than the 90s) so that supposition wouldn't be entirely wrong.

As grim as he is utterly compelling, there's a case to suggest that Punisher is actually the most logical superhero ever. His origin is pretty standard - if a little more bloody - but what makes him infinitely cooler than the apple-pie heroes who are more conventionally "good" is that he let his emotions run riot. He has no Batman or Daredevil-like No Kill rule, and he walks around with a bloody great skull on his chest. What are you even questioning?

The character's problem appears to be that nobody has actually got any clue how to make a truly great film for him (even though some of the films have been better than critical reception suggests). Marvel's greatest masterstroke yet might be in dropping the character into Daredevil's R-Rated Netflix Universe as a launching point. He makes more sense in that sort of world, where hyper-violence is a currency and nobody is worrying about the marketability of what amounts to the harbinger of death.