ANTI-HERO

The Nineties Anti-Hero is a specific version of the Anti-Hero. Not all such characters were created during the 1990s, but that was the time when they were most common and most popular.

The Nineties Anti Hero is the polar opposite of your typical Silver Age superhero. Not only are they flawed, they may lack any heroic attributes. However, they're rarely ineffectual or pathetic (in the eyes of the writer, anyway), generally instead being totally committed to whatever they're doing at the moment. They have no compunction about killing villains, and indeed, this may extend to anyone who gets in their way; facing The Cape or any hero who does mind, they sneer at them as outdated. Their super-powers (if they have superpowers — many are Bad ass Normals) tend towards the lethal as well, and may include growing spikes out of one's body, the power to psychically boil blood, or turning any item into a gun. They are usually either demonic or technological in origin.

Male Nineties Anti-Heroes are ridiculously muscled, and often wear lots of pouches or bandoliers. There's a good chance he's either young and "hip", or middle aged with lots of long, grey hair, beard stubble, and scars. He also probably has at least one eye that looks fake, injured, or diseased and he carries a ludicrously over sized gun or sword that no human being could possible carry. 

Female Nineties Anti-Heroes, like most female superheroes, have large breasts and small waists, but unlike most female superheroes, this is often taken to disfiguring extremes courtesy of the ineptitude of the trope's pioneering artists. They don't tend towear very much clothing (or if they do, it'll be typical super heroic barely-there "spandex"which showcases their exaggerated/inaccurate anatomy). But they still usually wear tights in some form. The ultimate extreme of the female version was the "bad girl" sub genre, featuring ludicrously buxom, near-naked Dark Action Girls, generally with some kind of supernatural nature or origin, hacking and pouting their way through plots designed solely to offer as much Gorn and Fan service as possible.