Bomb Queen: Trump Card #2 // Review
The 45th president of the United States is looking to run for a third term, but he's up against someone a lot more appealing than he is...and she appeals to the same people he does. Naturally, she's going to show-up at one of his campaign rallies and cause a bit of chaos in the second issue of Bomb Queen: Trump Card. Writer/artist Jimmie Robinson nearly tanks all of the potential of the miniseries' premise. Attempting to be both poignant and over-the-top with equal-opportunity offensiveness. Edginess comes across as childishness. It almost works.
She's been a dictator. Now she's being allowed to run against a wannabe dictator. They tell her to do talk shows, but she decides that it's more fun to head off to a rally for her opponent and upstage him at his own event by praising him. She's unpredictable, but she's carrying a kind of insanity with her that just might work against the masses that support him. As others toil away trying to figure out precisely why she's doing what she's doing and why she has returned from a five-year hiatus, able to speak fluent Chinese.
There's great promise in the premise: A supervillain dictator running for president against a dangerous, pompously ineffectual orange stain. The political figure himself is such a real-life satire on the American dream that Robinson would only need to point page and panel in the right direction. Sadly, Robinson's satire never makes it above the obvious. Bomb Queen's appreciation of Trump's ability to capture his base's enthusiasm is charming and everything. However, there's little doubt that she would see right through his arrogant eugenics and the appallingly cheap con of his image as a successful businessman. Robinson plants enough in the plot's background to suggest that Bomb Queen has more going on than meets the surface of the page, but subtle sophistication seems lost in a painfully obvious plod of an issue.
For the most part, the art is stiff and disinteresting. Robinson gave himself a little bit of a challenge here as an artist. Much of the action in the issue is simple oratory and political theatre. It's very difficult to make that look visually appealing on the comics page. Bomb Queen strikes a few gorgeous poses here and there. Trump looks...suitably Trumpian. None of it seems compelling, though. Some of the iconography IS interesting, though. Bomb Queen in a MAGA hat in a pose that looks a hell of a lot like a Nazi salute in front of a US flag? It's almost haunting.
Amidst it all, Robinson awkwardly gropes in the general direction of the fourth wall in a few bits of dialogue. It's almost clever, but doing so effectively would take far defter scripting than Robinson manages here. Of all the errors that Robinson manages this issue, the Trump rally's nearly full-page oration seems to be the most impressive failure. There was real potential in that flotilla of dialogue balloons. The idea of having an anti-hero say what the values of the US pop culture really are had been crystallized brilliantly in a few moments in the long-forgotten 1968 film Mister Freedom. It's been a long time since then. An update on Mister Freedom's honesty is sorely needed. Robinson spectacularly fails to update the spirit of that U.S. anti-hero honesty at the heart of the second issue of Trump Card.
