There are loads of male characters in all manner of fictional text and media. Some, though, have such innate manliness that you could practically distill and bottle it. Here’s a list of the manliest fictional characters ever to grace the page and screen.

8 Conan the Barbarian

8 Conan the Barbarian
Forget the movies. In the old novels that defined Conan’s character, he is a giant of a man with a commanding presence. He inspires scores of men who would follow him into battle at any given moment. Conan the Barbarian is a brilliant tactician, has a strict code of honor and women are drawn to him with immutable attraction. He faces monsters, magic and mayhem by day and goes drinking and wenching by night. Wenching! And to top it all off, he has all the rage and fury of his ancestors. Plus, his last name is “the Barbarian” and if that’s not manly, I don’t know what is.

7 Master Chief (of the ‘Halo’ series)
The Master Chief has no life of his own. He is the last of his kind and duty rules his actions. He relies on his Mjolnir armor, just as humanity relies on him: as a shield and protector. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and strives only to live another day to fight for the sake of humanity.

6 Wolverine
Nothing says warm and fuzzy like razor-sharp adamantium claws. This is a man who shows tough love or no love at all. He’s a rough, rogue of a mutant man who loves fighting, drinking and smoking big-ass cigars. Man or mutant, he easily makes the cut.

5 Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones is known for his resourcefulness, selflessness and utter luck. He’s intelligent, but fallibly human. Indy is an everyman that gets stuck in crazy situations he deals with not by brute strength or special powers, but by his sheer tenacity and clever manipulation of dangerous circumstances. And like every good man, a good woman and good friends are never far behind to help when the going gets rough.

4 Doom Guy (of the ‘Doom’ series)
The Doom Guy is manliness incarnate. His only form of communication is grunting in pain. When he cries, he cries blood. And, goddamn can that dude blast through hell spawn with a sinister level of enthusiasm and intensity. Want to make Doom Guy happy? Give him some chain gun ammo.

3 James Bond
James Bond has it all: intelligence, charm, cool confidence and a whole lot of guns and gadgets at his disposal. He is a killing machine, but he’s also a lover, falling for (and bedding) just about every beautiful woman he meets. He embodies a man’s quest for love and violence with style and aplomb.

2 Jack Bauer (of ’24′)
This is one of the most conflicted, deeply passionate characters on this list. And when I say passionate, I mean unstable. His knowledge of hand-to-hand combat is formidable, his use of guns and knives inspire awe and dread and his interrogation techniques are brutal, all in the name of protecting America. Plus, he’ll yell at you right in your face. And no one likes to be yelled at.

1 Batman
Tights aside, Batman’s altruistic form of revenge on evil-doers for the murder of his parents makes him a man’s man. He strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies, rides a thin line between psycho-vigilante and straight lawman and goes above and beyond, dedicating his life to crime fighting in the name of peace and justice.

When you follow a TV show long enough, the characters start to feel like real-life friends and family. Given this fact, when those sadistic TV writers decide to kill off one of your favorite characters, it can definitely have a serious impact. Below are a few of the most ]]>

When you follow a TV show long enough, the characters start to feel like real-life friends and family. Given this fact, when those sadistic TV writers decide to kill off one of your favorite characters, it can definitely have a serious impact. Below are a few of the most memorable TV character deaths of all time.

12 Omar Little – The Wire
Omar was the underdog stick-up man of the Baltimore ghetto. He stole from the rich drug kingpins and gave to himself. With a plethora of enemies throughout all five seasons, it’s pretty much a miracle that he lived as long as he did. However, that gunshot to the head courtesy of a seriously young little boy came as a shocker to pretty much everyone. Let’s whistle “Farmer in the Dell” one more time in his honor.

11 Rita Morgan – Dexter
Rita’s departure from Dexter was one of the most shocking and unexpected character deaths in recent memory. The horrible reveal came in the final moments of season four… right after all the loose strings of the season had already been wrapped up. With all the tension of the episode removed, the sight of Dexter walking into Rita lifelessly sitting in a tub filled with her own blood really brought a downer to that last episode.

10 Joyce Summers – Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Most characters on Buffy The Vampire Slayer don’t die of natural causes. Despite this fact, the death of Joyce Summers via boring-old aneurysm proved especially memorable. The 2001 episode coldly opens with a close-up of Joyce’s lifeless eyes staring directly into the camera. From here, the characters starkly reminisce about the character with a number of heartfelt moments throughout the episode.

9 Bill McNeal – NewsRadio
Given the reality of Phil Hartman’s death, this on-air death proved especially difficult. Whereas many shows would seek to find a more light-hearted way to explain the sudden absence of a TV character (or worse, simply replace him or her with another actor), NewsRadio nobly went with the truth. Hartman died between the fourth and fifth seasons of NewsRadio. For the season opener of season five, the cast learns Bill has had a heart attack. The episode brought a lot of the real emotions into the fictional world, and helped cement the death as a very memorable TV moment.

8 Teri Bauer – 24
With a new twist ending pretty much every hour of the day, Jack Bauer’s wife had a pretty miserable final 24 hours. After Jack saves her from being kidnapped and raped, all seems to be on the mend for this TV couple. That is, until Jack’s mistress reveals herself to be a plant, and shoots Teri right in her pregnant stomach.

7 Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake – MASH
MASH was a show that truly knew how to balance humor with grief. One of the saddest moments of the show was the episode in which Henry Blake had been discharged. Shockingly, Radar delivers the news to the rest of the cast that Blake’s plane was shot down en route to home. Famously, MASH writers report that they kept the death of Blake a secret to the cast until minutes before shooting. This helped make the reactions of Radar and the rest of the crew as authentic as possible.

6 Dan Connor – Roseanne
The death of Dan Connor is perhaps on of the most WTF TV deaths ever to occur. As the TV audience was led to believe, Dan suffered a heart attack, but eventually survived to win the lottery and become a millionaire with the rest of his family. However, in the series finale it was revealed that Roseanne Connor wrote the entire television series based on her fictional real life. In this “real” reality of the Connor universe, Dan actually died from the heart attack.

5 Maude Flanders – The Simpsons
“No foot-longs.” How’s that for a beloved TV character’s final words? Sadly, Maude was chosen to die because voice actor Maggie Roswell decided not to continue with the show after season 10. In classic Simpsons style, the character was comically killed off courtesy of a t-shirt gun at the Springfield Springway. The force of the shirt sent her reeling off the top of the grandstand and into the waiting arms of her beloved Jesus.

4 Anastasia Dualla – Battlestar Galactica
Talk about unexpected. Dee had finally seemed to reconcile with her estranged husband (Apollo). Grinning happily from this fact, Dee quietly smiled at herself in the mirror right before she put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. Suicide doesn’t happen often on TV shows, but in this case, it made poignant, if difficult, sense to the story progression of the character.

3 Susan Ross – Seinfeld
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more ridiculous (yet totally believable) cause of death than toxic glue from cheap wedding envelopes. Throughout season seven, poor George Costanza was trying desperately to find a way to call off the impending marriage between him and Susan. Just as it seemed he resigned himself to a lifetime of holy matrimony, Susan went and died completely by accident. Of course, in true Seinfeld form, the death failed to phase anyone (besides George and his restrained jubilation).

2 Adriana La Cerva – The Sopranos
This one was a tough one to watch. Adriana had been suckered into talking with the FBI about her husband Christopher’s role in the Soprano gang. Though she stayed strong to her husband and never gave the authorities much to work with, the news of these meetings enraged Christopher. Though he loved her and hated to do it, he ordered Silvio to drag her into the woods and take care of her for good.

1 Charlie Pace – LOST
There are a ridiculous number of memorable deaths from LOST. With a character pretty much dying off every other episode, you could easily make a whole list of “most memorable LOST deaths.” However, of them all, Charlie’s dramatic death in the flooded Looking Glass Station remains one of the most memorable scenes in the show. Not. Penny’s. Boat.

The 24 finale made me kind of sad because, well, I thought it kind of blew. But when searching for Kiefer Sutherland-related Internet stuffs, I came across this old photo and it amused me quite a bit, so here it is.

My favorite part of the ]]>

The 24 finale made me kind of sad because, well, I thought it kind of blew. But when searching for Kiefer Sutherland-related Internet stuffs, I came across this old photo and it amused me quite a bit, so here it is.

My favorite part of the photo is the nonchalance with which Kiefer is sitting there, like this is a totally normal situation and everything is status quo. That’s the thing with celebrities…when Kiefer does something like this in a restaurant, it’s “Oh, that wacky drunk!” But when I do something like this in a similar establishment, the guy in the Chuck E. Cheese costume just won’t stop hassling me. Hey, if the Skee Ball machine didn’t want to see my erect penis, maybe it shouldn’t have been so loose with its holes.

Via PHD Comics comes this look at the differences between the science on our favorite TV shows and how it is in real life.

It’s true, TV is really deceptive. For example did you know that there isn’t actually an underwater community with ]]>

Via PHD Comics comes this look at the differences between the science on our favorite TV shows and how it is in real life.

It’s true, TV is really deceptive. For example did you know that there isn’t actually an underwater community with a sponge and some fat sea mollusk and a squirrel in an astronaut suit? More liberal media spin from Nickelodeon.

Really though, if you can’t accept that TV takes some jumps in logic, you can probably just die. If TV were real life, Jack Bauer would spend countless hours on 24 filling out paperwork and dealing with explosive diarrhea from the toxins he was exposed to. But weeks of a show with a guy filing reports and asking for softer toilet paper for his sensitive asshole isn’t the most compelling thing on TV. More compelling than The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, sure. But watching Jill Scott’s fat ass bathing in butter while she does a sexy hippo dance for you would be more compelling than that “Hey, we’ve got black people that aren’t criminals on HBO! Love us!” drivel.

I don’t think any of my readers would indulge in such crass pasttimes as Internet pornography, but maybe you’ve heard of the popular Bangbus porn series. Well, this newest PG Porn video takes that concept and makes it extremely funny with “The Helpful Bus” (featuring the always-awesome Craig Robinson from ]]>

I don’t think any of my readers would indulge in such crass pasttimes as Internet pornography, but maybe you’ve heard of the popular Bangbus porn series. Well, this newest PG Porn video takes that concept and makes it extremely funny with “The Helpful Bus” (featuring the always-awesome Craig Robinson from The Office).

I don’t really have anything to add that’s funnier than that so I just want to point out that this season of 24 is pretty awesome. My favorite part this season was when Jack Bauer was falsely accused of something, then arrested, then still somehow ended up saving the world in spite of everyone else’s incompetence. Fortunately, that’s happened EVERY FING EPISODE. Yet in spite of that, it’s still awesome. Though you’d think people would stop questioning Jack. Like if I lit myself on fire 6 times and this one dude kept coming over with a bucket of water and putting it out, I’d imagine by the 7th time I’d be like “Oh, that dude with the bucket of water is going to help me out” instead of “HEY WHAT THE F ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT BUCKET OF WATER, STOP IT, I DON’T TRUST YOU OR YOUR METHODS” but maybe that’s just my naivete.

Anyway, watch 24. I’m sure that finally this little-heard-of show can finally get over the top based upon my recommendation.