My biggest pop culture obsession is X-Men. The X-Men have been my favorite superhero for ages, and it feels like every month I discover a new character that I fall in love with. From time to time on this blog, I'm going to just indulge myself and talk about an X-Men character that I love.
Let me tell you about Boom Boom, aka Tabitha Smith. Boom Boom Rules. She is an all-time great X-Men character (though she's never technically been on the X-Men team, per se). She is scrappy, funny, kind of mean, and really good at video games. She's basically Kate McKinnon's character from Ghostbusters in terms of personality and appearance, and if you love that character (and as a human being, you should), you will love Boom Boom.
Boom Boom's story is that she's a runaway (not one of the runaways, though) making her own life in the streets of New York when she falls in with a villain called The Vanisher. He's an abusive piece of trash, though, so she drops a bomb in his pants (oh yeah, she makes time bombs. That's her power and it's only like, the fourth best thing about her), and betrays him to go hang out with X-Factor, which is a very complicated organization that I guess I can only describe as "Ghostbusters for mutants -- though only pretending to be Ghostbusters -- and later on more of a government agency living in a sentient ship or something I kind of lost track."
Boom Boom bounces between groups a few times, first working with a Runaways-esque group called The Fallen Angels, then joining up with the New Mutants for a few issues before they become X-Force. She's then with X-Force during the Rob Liefeld era and goddammit, she's the best character on X-Force. She's the only character who seems to notice that everything is goddamn insane and over-the-top violent and everyone on X-Force is a huge asshole.
This is basically Boom Boom's job on every team she's a part of: she's kind of an asshole, but she knows she's an asshole, which means she assumes everyone else is an asshole and she's very good at calling out their various asshole-itudes. She's snarky and kind of mean and obsessed with fashion, but it's all to hide a very tender heart and a strong sense of injustice in the world. She's the best kind of snarky character: the kind that's only snarky because they're running away from their true feelings.
Boom Boom is also genuinely very funny in a way that most writers in the 80s and 90s really get. Her primary comedic conceit -- that she's a jerk with a heart of gold -- is one that's really easy to latch onto for even a halfway decent writer, and her secondary comedic conceit -- that her solution to almost every problem, no matter how small, is to blow it up -- is even easier. It's telling that in the genuinely terrible first few issues of Liefeld's X-Force, I still genuinely like her, and I hate everyone in Liefeld's X-Force.
Look, I love Jubilee. We all love Jubilee. But if it's a competition to see which sunglasses-wearing, snarky explosion-maker is the better character, my vote goes to Boom Boom.
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