12 Greatest Ever Comic Book Movie Anti-Heroes

7. Rorschach

The greatest selling point for any anti-hero is a singular agenda to do whatever it takes - no matter what the personal cost - to preserve the lives of those he feels compelled to protect. They should operate around the rules, beyond the control of the establishment, and mostly be a pain in the backside of anyone with a more binary morality code. In other words, they should be just like Rorschach.

Brilliantly, the masked vigilante - who channels the darker side of Batman, the dark charisma of Deadpool, Daredevil's community spirit and the gung-ho attitude of Punisher - is pretty much the personification of the dying cowboy in Watchmen. He's John Wayne in The Shootist combined with John Wayne in True Grit - a man out of time living to a code of ethics that is being sanitised to death and making his existence redundant.

Rorschach is the loner's superhero, a voice for the voiceless who doesn't sit in a high castle built on his dead parents' fortune and who inherently flows through the blood of the citizens he seeks to protect. He's unglamorous, mysterious and uncompromising, and Jackie Earle Haley's performance was downright perfect.