Jimmie Robinson loves Hello Kitty and says he is an “old Black dude who looks like a high school janitor.” Self-deprecating and honest about his demons, there’s nothing about the writer and artist on the surface that telegraphs the weirdness, the darkness, the madness that has enabled him to create and subsequently resurrect the Bomb Queen franchise for seven — and starting this week, eight — miniseries.
Bomb Queen will never be confused with some dense Hickman tome packed with data pages; with a half-naked woman hell-bent on sex and maybe a little world (S&M) domination, it occupies a different space in this great big comics industry. (Although Robinson does say the series is meant to examine superhero tropes. “You have to take it, turn it around yourself,” he told me. “How each reader does that is up to them.”)
Now, 14 years after the first “Bomb Queen” issue was published, the series returns for “Trump Card,” a four-issue arc that pits the titular villainess against all sides of the current (OK, just slightly in the future of a 2024 in which Donald Trump refuses to leave office) political spectrum. Issue #1 launched this Wednesday from Image.
I talked to Robinson via email about his personal struggles with depression, the context supporting the Queen’s creation and what she’s doing in 2020 — and maybe beyond.
First, you’ve written about depression in the past, and things now on a national/global scale are … not good. But how are you?
Thanks for asking, and thanks for talking. Yeah, depression, man…I’m taking meds now, and I’ve done my rounds of therapy, but that was before all this craziness in 2020. So in a way, I was kinda prepared. Back then, my — I’ll call ’em Black Days — was just a weird void that I couldn’t explain.
People ask me what started it and all that, and I always say, “If I knew what triggered my depression, I’d know how to solve or avoid it.” Thing is, I’ve rode the waves of depression before, and for a long time, but four years ago I really hit bottom. And no, it wasn’t about the election. I was doing well with my comic career, I was married and things were good in my life. But I just couldn’t escape the drop… the loss?… of vitality. It’s like I wasn’t even there. I was nothing. I walked out the front door and left the house and I was just, I dunno, gone. I was going to jump off the city bridge. I can’t swim, you see, so that thought was just in the back of my mind. Stopped when a skunk came out and I bolted from it. Then I thought, “Why am I afraid of a skunk if I was really gonna go through with jumping?” It was like, y’know, me seeing myself again.
But that was then.
Like I said, therapy, meds, time, self-care, etc., and here I am. As for the rest of the world…it’s like water rolling off a duck’s back. I’m not affected directly by it. My wife though, she gets crushed, like debilitatingly down in a rut. The global issues never trigger me. My dark days came from elsewhere.
One more general question, and then it’s off to Bomb Queen — this may not have anything to do with depression, but as someone who typically both writes and draws your books, do you ever feel like you’re working in isolation? Is the total control over the end product worth any downside?
Oh yeah, man. Without the link of collaboration, there’s gonna be that vacuum. I think I’ve done, what…? Three? Three books with other people. Maybe four if I dig back enough. Working in collaboration is actually unique for me. I mean, I learned how to make comics on my own. I learned the writing, drawing, coloring, lettering, everything. Cover to cover. Did that for years before I did anything with another person. And even then, it was like just one person. Not like a whole team. Well…there was one gig. I did a “What If?” book for Marvel Comics, and that was crazy weird because I was just one spoke on a wheel, you know what I mean? I wrote that issue, and that was it. My part was over. Felt wrong. I guess I’m used to working on all the details, all the fine tuning, right up to the day it goes to press, if possible.
So yeah, I feel like I’m working in isolation, but don’t get me wrong, because for me that’s a good thing. Well, OK. Yeah, maybe not a “good thing,” but it doesn’t bother me.
What I’ve been doing for the last two years is going to coffee houses and working in public. Thus, I can be around folks but still be in my own world. I use headphones when I draw and ink, and that keeps people from approaching me. When I write I can’t listen to anything with words. I just can’t have other words in my head. The thing is, though, when I get to the lettering stage, I often end up rewriting a lot of the book right there on the spot. I can’t do that when working with others. Adding an extra panel, extra word balloons and plenty of stuff that never even existed on the page. For me that’s all part of the construction of the comic.
Yeah, call it control, I guess.
But that’s how I enjoy working on my books.
Bomb Queen is a product of a specific moment in comics and pop culture — how would you describe it for people who didn’t live through it? And is there ever any fear that something could be lost in the decontextualization — especially now?
Hmmm…yeah, it was different then, and the decision to create her came from what I wasn’t seeing in comics, and yeah…I guess living through that time helps understand that. Basically, I made Bomb Queen after all the 1990s “Bad Grrrl” era. Tons of comics had characters in bikini spandex fighting crime and trying to be all gritty and edgy but really just being what I call swimsuit comic books. It was everywhere. People were snapping them up, and stores were ordering them. Got to the point where it became a joke.
Anyway, that phase came and went and the world was going through the 9/11 terror era and, of course, the Iraq War, but a lot of comics didn’t deal with the war because I guess it had no hard lines, nothing was black and white to make it easy, like fighting Nazis. At that time, I wanted to make a superhero comic. Up to that point, I was doing what many would call “alternative” stuff. So I wanted to try my hand at that genre, y’know?
I created the villain first. I went for the Bomb theme because the war on terror often involved explosives, suicide bombers, stuff like that. But I couldn’t come up with a good hero to fight the villain. That’s when I realized the book had to be about the villain. And not some sad sack story, bad childhood, took a wrong turn kind of villain. I wanted that black-and-white, Nazi-level villain. Pure evil. No sympathy, no compassion or understanding. A real villain. I decided the character would be female because of the “Bad Grrrl” angle.
All this stuff meant I was swimming against the current of comic books at the time, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to mock the superhero genre, flip it upside down, inside out. Do everything hero comics were doing but backward in favor of the villain.
Granted that kinda jujitsu isn’t obvious to everyone reading the series. And honestly, there’s nothing any creator can do once their work goes public. How it’s received, interpreted, imprinted, that’s on the reader’s side. Unless I’m being didactic and hitting people over the head with something blatantly obvious, but that’s not my style. I want to challenge the reader, not make them comfortable. I’m sure some of my work is lost in translation on some people. Some just see the surface … tits, ass, sexy Bad Grrrl comic. Others see the social-political angles or female empowerment side; some just want the violence, whatever. Point is, a lot of the deconstruction can be lost between the layers of the comic, but I want readers to dig for the gold.
I want them to discover that it’s really a cautionary tale about how we glorify villains and violence, how power is abused on all sides, how sex is viewed in America. Most books just do the “this is wrong,” “don’t do drugs,” whatever message. Most just push the do-the-right-thing narrative. Show how justice prevails. Bomb Queen is more like your dad catching you smoking and then makes you smoke the entire pack as an object lesson. Overkill and saturation is what I go for. Turn it around. See the problem from another angle. Create revulsion. It’s like the difference between book learning and real-life experience. That kind of stuff is often lost in translation. It’s not clear. Not black and white. You have to take it, turn it around yourself. How each reader does that is up to them.
The Queen is returning, of course, in “Trump Card” because of the political moment we find ourselves in with the 45th president of the United States. He’s been in office almost four years now — how long have you been thinking about doing this? How close is this to an Alien vs. Predator / “whoever wins, we lose” story?
In Bomb Queen, everyone always loses. That’s the point, hahaha! But I’ve been writing this story for two years now. Trump is a moving target. He tweets; he says stuff; he reacts to stuff; it’s constantly moving. Can’t pin him down on anything. With George Bush it was easy to pin the Iraq War on him, pin terror attacks on him, pin Halliburton on him, whatever. Trump is Teflon, nothing sticks. And anything he does now is old news in a week.
A comic based on our current cycle won’t even be relevant. That’s why I decided to move ahead of Trump by going into the future. Anything we’re doing now is already in the past. No more trying to keep up. I placed the story in 2024, Trump is ending his second term, but now he wants to change it for a life term. At this point, the superheroes are in a situation where they can’t attack a sitting president, and even if he is removed, his base still exists. So the superheroes turn to the evil Bomb Queen and fight fire with fire. She is tasked with stealing Trump’s support base, thus eliminating his power and influence. Bomb Queen was Trump before Trump. She already governed, made laws and rules in a city with a wall around it. She created division and used it to her benefit. Who better to steal the base from Trump, right? But everyone knows you never make deals with the devil.
So yeah, Alien vs. Predator, humanity loses like the grass under the feet of a stampede of elephants. But in doing so, I focus on the factors of society that got us to this point. As Bomb Queen campaigns for president, we see the underbelly of American society and the mess created. It’s not left vs. right…this is gray vs. gray. Bomb Queen reveals that nobody is clean in this story arc.
You’ve blown up the world a couple of times now during the Bomb Queen saga, basically (literally?) nuking any kind of status quo you might have had. Did you have an overall vision for where you wanted to go with the series, or do you just go with ideas for the various minis? And with the last couple of books, did you feel like you were working your way out of a corner?
Man, I just got tired. I’ll tell you the truth. There’s only so much rape, murder, genocide and slaughter that can be done. Every story arc I needed to top the last. And when a character is already pitch-black evil, there’s no real growth there. I had said what I wanted to say, and hopefully, my message was out there. So, I took her to the extremes. Annihilation. Same thing in the last story arc where I took her to the future. I just destroyed the past and let her romp ahead of us. At this point Bomb Queen is just whatever I need her to be.
I know some folks will make a big deal about continuity. I’m not like that. In fact, that’s a rule in the genre I want to twist. That’s why Bomb Queen is a series of story arcs, each with a beginning, middle and end. It’s not one long ongoing saga. For me, the overall vision isn’t about a specific goal, like save-the-world stuff. For me, the vision is tweaked and warped. Why does evil prevail? Why do we love the villain? Charles Manson merchandise, love letters to Jeffery Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter TV shows, the Joker, you name it.
This isn’t the first time you’ve touched on real world politics with Bomb Queen since Barack Obama was a central character in Book VI. I thought Obama specifically was some of the best writing as a thoughtful, reasonable guy trying to do his best in a crazy world dominated by the Queen. Writing about Obama vs. writing about Trump — how has that experience been different?
As with all Bomb Queen books, I had to think in reverse. See, I like Obama. Voted for him, all that. But Bomb Queen, created during the George Bush era, obviously would hate him. And likewise, Obama would not stand for a place like Bomb Queen’s city. New Port City is sanctioned by the government, and that program would be cut under Obama. I had to walk lightly in that story arc. When I told the publisher, they understood; however, they added a caveat. I could NOT kill him. So going with that I set out to hurt him, even maim him and destroy the country under him. Honestly, I thought it was a mess. It was something I could’ve done in two issues. I just wanted to set the ground rules now that the administration had changed.
[Will’s note: Book VI is great. Don’t listen to the guy who made it.]
Everything changed when Trump took over. I honestly thought Hillary was gonna win, so I was planning yet another story of Bomb Queen vs. the government, blah, blah, blah. When looking at it as a whole, Bomb Queen has always been about politics. Her city is sanctioned by the government; she was created by the government to rule a city of crime to make the rest of the country safer. So yeah, I was planning more of the same…but Trump won. Blew me away. At that point, I tossed out everything because this was 180 degrees of anything I was cookin’ up. In fact, I was a little stumped. And as time went by and Trump kept being…well, Trump…I realized not only would Trump love Bomb Queen, but the reverse would be true, as well. Hell, they were made for each other.
So I had to think backward, yet again. What kind of story could I shape when there is no conflict with authority? That really challenged me. It took over a year to get all the puzzle pieces and character motivation together. I realized the real story was not really the president, but the power that put him there. That power was his base. Which is the same power Bomb Queen had over the government. Thus, the story grew into a view about America and how I could merge it, not just her city of crime, with Bomb Queen. This is a very challenging position for me, because it’s not about choosing a side, y’know, like Democrats or Republicans. The Queen only does things to further her agenda, so the focus had to be on her, not Trump. This means both camps might have reason to hate me, because I’m using the president in a way that might glorify him at the same time I’m also tossing the Democrats to the side.
Bottom line, nobody ever wins when you make a deal with the devil. That’s what’s happening here. I’m just not sure how many will pick that up.
Looking back at the 30+ issues, you’ve really pushed explicit sexual content and stuff that’s hard to reckon with such as slurs and sexual abuse. (Funny, though, I’m sure you never hear about the violence — or do you?) First, why go those places? Second, do you feel like you’ve pulled back at all as the series has evolved? And is there anything you’d take back? Or draw the line at?
Yeah, it’s pretty wild sometimes, eh? The entire series is about reversing the superhero comic genre. Evil wins, and justice loses. Most hero books are about someone trying to help the world, and the ground rules usually focus on the conflict between the powers. The people in the city are often just background props because the unspoken agreement with the reader is that society wants the hero to win. Now take a reverse of that. What happens when a villain controls a city, and the people LIKE it that way? The story becomes a reflection on society. The citizens are no longer props for the reader. The citizens become the reason the main character is there in the first place. Bomb Queen rules a city of criminals. Full stop. With a societal infrastructure based on crime and terror, we end up throwing ethics out the window. The city itself becomes a character. A place where the rules change, and sex and violence is promoted. A city of crime doesn’t want a hero to protect them; they want someone who understands them, and that person would not only be like them but also worse than them. The top dog. Bomb Queen is that. She embodies everything that we consider wrong and justifies it to those who support her. So yeah, sex, violence, racial slurs, whatever; it has to be shown to reach the full effect. It’s an ugly path to take and it’s pretty damn dark, but it serves the reverse story I’m trying to create.
Now here’s where it gets tricky, right? World building an unethical society means all bets are off the table. In other words, I could go completely off the rails to illustrate a society that’s gone off the deep end. But this book, like the physical copy in your hands, still exists in our world and we do have laws. So obviously I can’t go too far down that dark road. I don’t want my publisher getting legal warnings or end up in court over obscenity laws. I mean, yeah…I push the envelope pretty hard, haha! And sometimes the publisher would question things, which is their right. But more importantly, there’s some stuff I pull back on because I don’t want that to overshadow the story. Some readers just want chaos and mayhem from cover to cover, or tits and ass top to bottom, but that’s not the point of the series.
With all of that said, one of the reasons I wanted to chat with you is that I think people can read these books and think you’re a cold bastard — but then, they (like me) get to the process stuff at the end of your collected volumes and learn about your trusted Hello Kitty mechanical pencil. How did the Hello Kitty stuff start, and more generally, how do you reconcile what seems to be a pretty congenial persona with this book?
Yeah, my obsession with Hello Kitty will follow me to the grave. Look, here’s the deal, right? I create worlds from my head, but it’s not a reflection of me any more than the horrible things that Stephen King writes in his books. Now if Bomb Queen was the only thing I hung my hat on, then yeah, people might think I’m an evil thug. But the fact is I make all kinds of books. Stuff for children, teens and adults. I admit, Bomb Queen outsells all my other titles, but my career is more than this series.
Or, let me say it like this: I balance my life and work with other things (like Hello Kitty) just to keep me sane. I also build fairy houses that I put out in my neighborhood. I have a lot of sides to me, and on top of that, when I talk to readers they can see (well, I hope) that I’m not what they envisioned as the creator of Bomb Queen. At comic conventions, I often have to convince people that I am the creator of the series. Yup, me! Some old Black dude who looks like a high school janitor.
I tell you, though, sometimes it does make me wonder how I am viewed, and my wife will tell you that sometimes I’m kinda embarrassed by it. Like I’ll even downplay it. I see the franchise as just one of the many books I do. It’s not a platform I stand on; it’s just another brick in my wall.
Speaking of your process, one of the most interesting things I read about was your work with the precursor to Photoshop. What’s it been like as an artist to watch digital tools evolve? And how dedicated to the “old ways” are you? What does your mechanical pencil have that Photoshop doesn’t?
Oh man! Talk about game changer. I’m an old fart. Like ancient to some of the new comic kids. I’ve been around the block more than a few times. I predate Photoshop and even the internet. I was there when Photoshop came in. I worked for a commercial printing company for 13 years, so I was at the front lines where applications like that were introduced. Prior to that I worked on a computer system like Photoshop, but it was a giant machine and the brain of the system was in another room. Trust me, this was not hardware from off the shelf of an electronics store. That’s where I made my very first self-published comic, “CyberZone.” I made the color covers on that self-proprietary machine. You can say I was using the “office supplies” to make my books, haha!
Nowadays, programs for image manipulation are just a touch away to any consumer who wants it. And it can fit in the palm of your hand. And the internet can reach straight to your audience without any help from a publisher or distributor. I think it’s great! I wish I had such tools at hand when I started. But, uhm…at the same time, I’m also glad I started when I did because now that anyone can make a comic, the attention for eyes is all the harder. A double-edged sword, right?
Currently, I’m sitting in both worlds. I have an iPad Pro with a stylus. I have Photoshop on my desktop. I can do digital art. But at the same time, I have stacks of paper, pencils, ink and brushes. I work traditionally at first, but when I scan in the finished art, I still fix it up on the computer. And when I say “fix it up,” sometimes I’m talking about redrawing entire panels. I don’t see much difference between my pencil and my stylus. The end result is what I care about the most. How and what I have to do to get there doesn’t matter. So, yeah, the “old ways” still work, in fact, that’s what I’m doing for the current Bomb Queen series. Also, I do it to have original art to sell at conventions. Digital is nice, but it doesn’t have an aftermarket.
Finally, what’s next for you — what do you see on the horizon? And what do you see in the future for Bomb Queen?
Next for me is kinda weird, because I have another series already done, just sitting in my office. A five-issue series called “ARTillery.” I tried shopping it around the comic industry, but I got no response, or it got turned down. I’m hoping to take it to publishers in the wider book market. I’m also trying to get a few other graphic novels off the ground with publishers outside the comic industry. These other books are nothing like Bomb Queen.
After the Trump story arc, I’m not sure where Bomb Queen will go. No, really. I don’t have another story for her. If anything happens, it would be a crossover into another comic that has a story.
That’s not to say I’m done with the Queen; trust me, if a story idea hits me, I’ll be there, y’know…if I have the time.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
