Mad Bomber

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Corporal Piebald doing what he does best.

"So he says to me: 'you gotta do something smart, baby! Something big!' He says 'You wanna be a supervillain, right?' And I go: 'Yeah, baby! Yeah yeah! What do I gotta do?' He says, 'You got bombs, blow up the Comet Club! It's packed with superheroes, you'll go down in supervillain history!' And I go 'Yeah, baby! 'CAUSE I'M THE EVIL MIDNIGHT BOMBER, WHAT BOMBS AT MIDNIGHT! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" —The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight, The Tick

Sometimes you'll encounter someone who just seems to have the perfect personality to go along with their job, like a real life work related version of Personality Powers. For example, maybe an old time watchmaker would have a very careful, analytical mind that paid very close attention to detail. What could be better for someone who has to very carefully use, assemble and repair something made of hundreds of tiny springs and gears?

Then sometimes people will take this too far. To use the example above, perhaps our watchmaker is a coldhearted person who cannot stand other human beings and is incapable of basic human interaction because everyone else is too messy and emotional rather than clean, precise and easily understandable like the clocks and watches he works with. Which makes him a jerk with issues, but no big deal, right?

So what happens when you take that level of obsession and neurosis and give it to someone whose job is creating and using explosives? You wind up with a recipe for disaster. Take someone who has no friends and cannot interact with others, has some Freudian Excuse or a terrorist cause (or, more likely, no cause at all) or is just plain old Ax Crazy, give him a Weapon of Choice that kills people Deader Than Dead (and he usually seems to have no problem getting his hands on the ingredients for creating more bombs), and you have a classic stock villain. (Although despite the status as a stock villain, they are often a chilling one, because of seemingly how easily this could be Truth in Television).

See also Bomb-Throwing Anarchists, Having a Blast and Why Am I Ticking?

Examples of Mad Bomber include:

Anime and Manga

• The Greed Island arc of Hunter X Hunter features Gensuru, the "Bomb Devil" or "Demon Bomber", whose Nen abilities are based on explosions.
• Cowboy Bebop has a one episode villain Teddy Bomber, who likes to hide his bombs in teddy bears that he leaves on his target site. He's quickly eclipsed by the "serious" rivalry between Spike and Andy during the episode in question, "Cowboy Funk."
  • The Teddy Bomber is eventually revealed as a subversion. Despite his fondness for teddy bears (which are there to help in his similarity to Theodore Kaczynski) he has a politically motivated reason for blowing up buildings and hates causing unnecessary collateral damage (needless to say, the "unnecessary collateral damage" part happens a lot once Spike and Andy get involved...)
• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro has "Histerrier", who is quite literally mad, and has no motive for planting the bombs other than being a bored housewife. Although she may have been the first of the main villain's pawns to be unveiled.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Solf J. Kimblee (also known as the Crimson or Red Lotus Alchemist) is certainly crazy, but he's good at hiding it, doubling as The Philosopher and a Social Darwinist with a Faux Affably Evil demeanour, and a genuine respect for people who stick to their guns. Still a raging psychopath though, and one who sees no difference between saving people as a doctor and killing them as a soldier. The Bomber part comes in with his own brand of alchemy: he destabilizes the molecules in everything around him to create explosions, at times making the very air explode.
  • In the 2003 anime version, Kimblee is much worse at hiding his craziness. His powers are rather different from the manga version, and slightly less destructive. Instead of making the air explode, he transmutes things into bombs by rearranging their chemical components into explosives. His favourite targets are people, which he turns into delayed chemical explosives and laughs at while they deal with being dead men walking. He can and will turn virtually anything, including his fellow soldiers, into organic bombs. In his first encounter with Scar, Kimblee went so far as to blow up separate limbs and the skin on Scar's forehead, creating the distinctive facial marking. After he blew up the wrong people (namely his commanding officers) and was arrested, he actually earned the new nickname "Madman Bomber". Tells you a lot about how stupid some of the people in the Amestrian government are that they feel it's a good idea to bail him out of jail, give him a Philosopher's Stone, and ask him to be an assassin. Take a guess as to what happens.
• The 2003 series of Astro Boy has Kato, who combines this trope with Mad Artist. He calls his acts of destructions his "masterpieces."
• Gokudera from Katekyo Hitman Reborn keeps a near-endless supply of sticks of dynamite concealed on his person at all times. Like his Weapon of Choice, he's quite a bit unstable, but he's not one of the villains of the story, as he was a test of Reborn's to start with and converts to Tsuna's side after Tsuna defuses all of his bombs with his dying will in order to avoid dying, and becomes his obsessively devoted self-described 'right-hand man.' Tsuna prefers to think of him as a friend.
• Naruto had Deidara, member of Akatsuki who passionately believes his explosions are a work of beautiful, fleeting moments of art, and has frequent arguments with Sasori over it. His sole motive as a missing-nin (a ninja, who betrays his village by defecting) is to blow up things; the fact that he can get paid for it by Akatsuki or terrorist organizations is just icing. He doesn't mind Sasori having differing opinions so much, but he can't stand his art being treated with indifference as by Itachi and Sasuke, the latter of whom finally beats him .Ultimately, he decides to blow himself, trying to take Sasuke with him- not for defeating him, mind, but for the whole indifference thing.
• Subverted in Detective Conan; the bomber in the first Non-Serial Movie is the architect who built all of the buildings he either blew up or nearly blew up. He did it because he was a Neat Freak who considered those buildings his Old Shame. And also wanted to "punish" Conan (and Kogoro) for trapping him, via getting Ran (almost) fatally trapped in the last one.
• 'Minnie' May Hoskins from Gunsmith Cats is a borderline example. The 18 year old ex-prostitute has other interests; but in addition to her lighting up at the idea of anything explosive and keeping a fair bit of materiel on her person, blowing things up or smelling things associated with demolitions is the most reliable way of... well... bringing said other interests to the forefront of her mind.
  • Her much older boyfriend Ken Takizawa also fits the bill, although he's much calmer about his obsession. Unlike May, he has also arranged actual terrorist bombings for living.
• Tantei Gakuen Q / Detective Academy Q also featured one of these: Yoshinari Taiki, a delightfully insane "Jewelry Summoner" who was thoroughly convinced that he was acting on behalf of his "gods" by targeting places related to birthstones. It turned out that the nutcase somehow arrived to the conclusion that he was his own god as he tried to control everything.
• Minene, the 9th Diary Holder of Mirai Nikki, who first introduces herself by blowing up a school. She does get a lot of Character Development, though, and ends up being one of the most sympathetic characters in the series.
• Yu Yu Hakusho presents to us Karasu, a demon specialized in channeling his energy to create explosives and one of the members of Team Toguro during the Dark Tournament Arc.
• The Playing Card Bomber from Yu-Gi-Oh! is a sadistic psychopath who stakes people's lives on a game of solitaire (the anime changed it to a guessing game involving balloons - probably to keep the number of card games down to one), by detonating bombs depending on the player's choices. Guess who did the voice for this guy.
• Nice Holystone from Baccano, a rare female and good example, carries a good supply of home-made explosives, and compulsively drops them. She even has fond memories of the one that blew up in her face, badly scarring her and taking out her eye.

Comic Books

• The Sin City story "The Big Fat Kill" has Brian, a former IRA member turned mercenary who has a quote on the quotes page that is a pretty serious Kick the Dog and potentially Nightmare Fuel.

"Y'see, I'm not too fond of shootin'. It's my preference to blow things up. Once you blast the roof off a pub and see all the parts flying off people, a little bang-bang's never gonna match the sight of that."

• Spider-Man keeps fighting Green Goblin and Hobgoblin, whose main method of attack is throwing bombs disguised as pumpkins.
  • More notably is the supervillain Nitro who can self-detonate and than reform himself. A chemical enchanced use of his power caused the destruction of Stamford, killing over 600 people and the New Warriors, setting of a series of events that led fellow Mad Bomber Norman Osborn into power.
• A rarity for this character type is the villainess Plastique in The DCU, one of the few times a mad bomber is female. Unlike most examples also, she was also fairly inept and had for a brief time reformed, but now she's back to bomb-throwing.
• In G.I. Joe's Reloaded continuity, Firefly is a terrorist for hire who listens to energetic classical music (such as Beethoven's Fifth) while on the job and reacts to the thought of the train he's hitting not even having the person he's supposed to get with:

Firefly: If this is the wrong train after all this work...I am gonna laugh so freakin' hard.

• In Tinus Trotyl, an ancient Dutch comic, the titular Anti-Hero protagonist is one of these. Whether it was a clogged drain or being kidnapped by terrorists, he solved the problem by blowing stuff up.
• 'Twitch', one of the Carnival of Killers, who pursues Batman in the Batman vs Predator II mini-series.
• Dynamite Joe. Observe. The answer, obviously, is "because he can't duct tape a dynamite stick to a bullet and mortars are no fun".

Comic Strips

• Kranti and her goons solve their problems by bombing whatever is causing them in Minimum Security.

Film

• The movie Blown Away has a Big Bad with a similar MO to Brian from Sin City, and is accused of not caring about any cause but just wanting to blow things up.
• Cody, the special effects guy from Tropic Thunder.
• The first year twins in the 2007 St Trinian's movie.
• Howard Payne, the Big Bad of the first Speed film.
• This trope is in Dr. Strangelove!
• Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker's father was the "Alphabet Bomber", who bombed buildings in alphabetical order. He got the electric chair.
• The reason why Christian is in the mental institute of The Dead Pit is because he developed these tendencies in the army.
• Cary from Super 8. As Joe's dad puts it: "I got nothing against your friends, I like your friends. Except for Cary, who can't seem to stop lighting things on fire."

Literature

• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Aerys the Mad King had enormous caches of jars filled with "wildfire" hidden throughout the capital city to make it explode and burn to prevent it from falling into the hands of La Résistance.
• Most of the sappers in the Malazan army have this to some degree. This is likely a pre-requisite for the job, however, as they're essentially rushing across a killing field carrying volatile explosives which they have to plant and then run away from before they explode.
  • Fiddler lampshades it occasionally, pointing out just how crazy and dangerous using Moranth munitions can be.
  • Most evident during one assault when one of the sappers runs back to the lines laughing hysterically. Everyone who sees this takes cover, because a laughing sapper means they probably used all the munitions they had.
• Trashcan Man from Stephen King's The Stand. One of the best Mad Bombers in fiction.
• In several Ciaphas Cain novels Captain Federer, the head of the sappers attached to the Valhallian 597th, makes an appearance. Although not a villain, Federer is described as having "an unhealthy enthusiasm" for explosives and his eyes getting a "dreamy quality" at the thought of setting off an explosion that is measured in gigatonnes. When said explosion is set off, it winds up covering half a planet with the dust cloud.
  • And before that he rigged the battlefield to blow up the advancing Ork Gargant — a cobbled-together behemoth of a war machine able to fight several Necron Monoliths at once and win; and would've certainly blow it up if not for a changed tactical situation.
  • It was openly stated in the books that he's a former Adeptus Mechanicus acolyte and was expelled from the seminary exactly for his unhealthy fascination with the Stuff Blowing Up. Praise the Emperor that the Guard gave him an outlet for his hobbies.
    • Some of the rumors go so far as to say he wasn't just expelled for blowing stuff up, he was expelled for blowing the seminary up.
• In one of the books of The Lost Fleet series, Geary wonders whether the engineers will be able to jury-rig several wrecked ships' power cores to turn the ships into a super-minefield. An engineering watchstander tells him, "that's the sort of challenge any good weapons engineer would do just for the love of it. Making something really big blow up in a new way? It doesn't get any better than that."
  • Shortly before that they wanted to blow open the cargo holds on some captured ships. Geary asked if the Engineers wanted help from the Marines. The was informed that "Engineers are better than Marines at blowing stuff up." His answer "We will hold a contest someday."
• Mr. Red from Demolition Angel by Robert Crais is a cross between this and Psycho for Hire
• Dresden Files: Not his only method of killing by any means, but Kincaid has a somewhat disturbing tendency to jump to "high explosives" as the solution to all life's ills. Harry, being Harry, nicknames this the "Bolshevik Muppet solution".

Live Action TV

• Lance Corporal Jones from Dads Army mentions in one episode (where the platoon have gone to a training camp for explosives) that he used to be called "The Mad Bomber" during the First World War. He said this to the officer running the camp, who was already on the verge of having a nervous breakdown because of all the other over-eager Home Guard platoons that had been through before the show's main characters.
• Inverted with Carter in Hogan's Heroes, who is actually very friendly, enthusiastic, and amiably clueless about most things. He just really likes his explosives, to the point of being depressed that he had to send several of his handmade bombs to be dropped on a Nazi facility without getting to go along and watch, comparing it to sending a child off into the world.
• In Doctor Who there was Ace, perhaps the only heroic example of this trope. She carried around a backpack full of home made explosives which she was very quick to use, at least early on.
  • The Doctor was also quite adamant about her not carrying those around. However, he did appreciate it's usefulness...

The Doctor: You wouldn't [be doing] anything so insanely dangerous as to be carrying any Nitro 9 around with you, would you? Ace: Of course not. I'm a good girl and do what I'm told. The Doctor: Excellent! Blow up that vehicle.

• The Muppet Show had Crazy Harry, who'd show up and blow stuff up whenever people said explosive words like dynamite *KABOOM!*
  • The Sandra Bullock episode of Muppets Tonight had a parody of Howard Payne who was simply called "the Mad Bomber". He turned out to be Sandra Bullock in disguise.
• A more comedic nice guy example: Edgar Montrose from The Red Green Show. While he's considered at times to be the local bomb squad, he once refuted the claim of being an expert; instead, he's more of an enthusiast. His Catch Phrase? KABOOM!
• This is Fiona Glennane's hat. She's got a reputation for being Ax Crazy, too, which she uses to great effect a number of times when interrogating bad guys. It's good she's on Michael's side.
  • And yet, even she is appalled by IRA freelancer Thomas O'Neill, who basically sets off bombs just for the thrill of blowing people up, the more, the better. Innocent women and children? All the better! He even goes as far as to put rat poison in his bombs, because it contains an anticoagulant, and makes his victims bleed more. Don't worry. Like any good Villain of the Week, he gets his by the end of the episode.
  • Don't forget Simon. "I like a hotel blowing up every once in a while!"
• Prometheus from the MacGyver episode "The Prometheus Syndrome".
• Mac Taylor and his team pursue a mad bomber in the CSI New York episode "Charge of this Post".
• The Cold Case episode "Sabotage" featured a perp (loosely based on the Unabomber) who would send his targets bombs inside beautiful hand carved wooden boxes as a form of protest against modern society growing preference towards the disposable. His Freudian Excuse almost makes you feel sorry for him (he lost his job to outsourcing, lost his childhood home to a software firm that went under shortly after it started, his daughter died due to losing healthcare benefits which the led to his divorce)...until you learn that the first victim was a guy who didn't refund a shower radio one day after the return date and tries to blow up his brother's wife and child for no apparent reason other than the fact that his brother works in a bank (and stopped supporting him after an argument).
• Myth Busters. They just blow up everything they can.

"The only thing that separates us from a couple 14-year-old pyromaniacs is ballistic glass."

• • Brainiac Science Abuse, being one of those shows meant to capitalize on the popularity of Mythbusters, also likes to blow shit up, but isn't quite as good at it.
• Power Rangers RPM gives us Gem and Gemma, the Sixth and Seventh Ranger Creepy Twins who are extremely happy to blow things up... with somewhat less than ideal regard for the collateral damage.
• Captain Gunpowder from Wild Boys.
• Alcatraz has Paxton Petty who was a combat engineer in the Korean War and felt that the government betrayed him after some Korean civilians are killed by his landmines and he is blamed. To get revenge he starts planting landmines in public places around San Francisco. He even tries to put landmines in the playground of an elementary school. The thought of a bomb disposal expert being killed disarming one of his bombs feels him with joy. He even uses a landmine as a grenade when escaping the cops.

Music

• Doctor Steel's "Lament for a Toy Factory".

"All through the night, as I laughed I set off my explosives! (screams) "YAAAAA YA YA YAAAAA YA YA YAAAA YA YAAAAA YA YAAAA YAAAA! "But alas, I was detained, and they labeled me 'Criminally insane.'"

Tabletop Games

• The Jammers of Feng Shui absolutely love to...how shall we put this... "BLOW THINGS UP! BLOW THINGS UP!"
• Orks of Warhammer 40000 love dakka and things that go boom (accuracy fully optional).
• Forgotten Realms has at least two such characters. Tinkersdam of Gond, the alchemist from novels is a Mad Scientist of many interests, but he ended up repeatedly exiled from just about everywhere for causing explosions and upon establishing his own lair/laboratory continued to make explosives, including directed-blast devices, for friends and regular clients... time fuses are his weak side, though. Irilivar Celevessin is one of few elves who like smokepowder and spectacular destruction in general. He was eventually employed as an assassin with specialization in bomb-throwing and explosive booby-traps, supplied with smokepowder and given tasks that keep him away from the home.

Video Games

• Fatman of Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty is a guy obsessed enough with bombs to codename himself after the Nagasaki bomb, and manages the impressive feat of going rogue from a military unit that had already gone rogue to make his mark on history by blowing things up. Vamp even lampshades it by calling Fatman a 'stereotypical mad bomber'.
• Grenade Man from Mega Man 8 loved explosions so much he secretly wanted to get blown up himself because he's masochistic. He cries, "That felt good!" when he explodes and dies.
  • Similarly, Bombman from the original Mega Man and Mega Man Powered Up, to the point that he accompanies every entrance by screaming "BOMBS!!". The best Dialogue in the game is between the Pyromaniac Fire Man and Bomb Man.
• Bob-Ombs of Super Mario Bros 2 and onward, of course. There's also that damn chicken in Super Mario Galaxy that drops egg bombs on you...
  • Another Mario example: Punchinello from Super Mario RPG. A crazed purple lunatic who takes residence in the Moleville mines, Punchinello is capable of summoning waves after waves of Bob-Ombs when he fights against against Mario and Co. Punchinello also brings the quite literal example of Hoist by His Own Petard as his attempt of summoning the King Bomb ends up with the oversized explosive falling on top of him.
    • In fact Punchinello is a humanoid bomb, as all of Smithy's goons are anthropomorphized weapons. However since the Mario series already has semi-humanoid bombs in the form of the Bob-Ombs, Punchinello was taken even further, to the point of being almost unrecognizable as a bomb... it doesn't help that he himself doesn't explode, but rather uses Bob-Ombs as explosives.
  • Mouser from Super Mario Bros 2 counts, as well.
• As quoted above, a certain Black Scottish Cyclops from Team Fortress 2 fits this trope to a tee.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has a unique Elite Mook actually named the Mad Bomber.
  • Heck, Link himself might be able to qualify for this trope--think about it. He has bags of bombs in every game, and even blows stuff up AS A CHILD.
• Never forget the Goblin Techies from that pervasive Warcraft III pastime: Defense of the Ancients (DOTA).
  • This holds true for most Goblins in the Warcraft-universe.
• The Crazy Ivans deployed by the Soviets of Red Alert 2 - they can wire anything, even your own troops, to explode with their endless supply of dynamite.

Crazy Ivan: "Here, hold this!

• • To put it in perspective, the Crazy Ivan is the only unit in the game that has the pretty descriptive AttackCursorOnFriendlies attribute in the game files.
  • And it is possible to take this even further: getting hold of an Allied spy and infiltrating their Battle Lab gives a Soviet player the ability to build Chrono Ivans. Think a Mad Bomber is bad? Try a Mad Bomber with Teleport Spam.
  • Chrono Commandoes can do it even better.
• One mission in Grand Theft Auto III involves fighting a legion of SPAN Ked-up Madmen with bombs strapped to their chests.
• More of a rule than an exception in the Jagged Alliance games, most memorable being Fidel "Leave me alone, I busy!" Dahan.
  • To the point that, in the second game, after the Association of International Mercenaries has gotten more than a little bit of legitimacy and has a better list of recruits to choose from, they sack every single one of the Mad Bomber types from their roster...and still end up with at least two bomb-crazy psychos on the payroll.
• Nuts Cracker, one of the antagonists from Popful Mail (in particular the Sega CD version), is quite fond of explosives. And if that weren't enough by itself...

"I'ma gonna make you squeal like that stupid elfa kid! BOOMBA, haha!"

• Wendy Cheslock from Valkyria Chronicles has all the hallmarks of one, be it her introduction ("Heheh. Ka-boom! Heheh."), her background and motivations for joining the militia (accidentally blew up her house, and joined so she could test out some of her creations.) or her epilogue (becomes part of the Gallian military R&D division, where her pieces of work are described as 'potent' and 'very effective' but too unstable for use by any sane soldier.)
• Zorne Sepperin, who happens to have a bomb-making machine in her Power Fist. And is not afraid to use it!
• The villain in the Atari 2600 game Kaboom! is named The Mad Bomber. He spends the game dropping bombs and it's your job to catch them in buckets of water before they hit the ground and explode.
• Dworkin Glavonak in the Dragon Age Awakening expansion is introduced luring a bunch of Darkspawn to one of his hidden explosives and laughing in glee as they go down in flames. During the "Bombs Away!" side quest you can provide him the raw materials he'll need to create new bombs. His brother certainly thinks he's nuts and mentions that Dworkin has lost at least three or four apprentices due to the risks of experimenting with explosive materials. If you ignore him and tell Dworkin to go nuts with the material, the bombs he makes will have the same effect as the Mage Inferno spell.
• Miniboss Roger Red Ant in Croc 2.
• Bomberman is a rare heroic (and non-mad) serial bomb-planter, but even he can pick up a disease in multiplayer that causes him to drop bombs uncontrollably.
  • The Ax Crazy Assault Bomber in Bomberman Generations manages to combine this trope with Trigger Happy.
• The Suffering had a rather annoying inmate whose weapon was TNT. Needless to say, he would bomb anything and everything that came his way, you included until you caught up to him.
• Stu from Donkey Kong Country Returns has only one attack that doesn't involve throwing various kinds of bombs from the pot he's in (swooping at you). The rest are all explosive-based, and to beat him, you have to throw his Cartoon Bombs back at him. The "mad" part comes from the fact that he's Brainwashed and Crazy.
• Peacock from Skullgirls is a psychotic child whose body has been rebuilt to be a weapon of mass destruction. Lots of her attacks involve 40's cartoon throwbacks. but her favorites are the bombs which walk, fly planes, and drive cars! One of her super attacks is to produce a Giant bomb called Fat Man.
• The Mad Dok unit in Dawn of War is capable of dropping a bomb that deals ridiculous amounts of damage and Knockback, but requires him to get very close to the enemy in order to drop it. Good thing he has a skill that can make him invulnerable and another that lets him quickly regenerate.
• More Cloudcuckoolander than Ax Crazy, but Kotohime from the PC-98 exclusive Touhou Project: Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream is definitely touched in the head, and most of her spellcard-style attacks are actually bombs, so she otherwise qualifies.
• As if Kefka Palazzo wasn't insane or psychotic enough in his original game, he was also given traits of this trope in the Dissidia subseries of Final Fantasy. During gameplay, Kefka uses a certain spell (Ultima) and, upon its detonation, he goes into a laughing fit. Story mode for the first game makes this worse, as he often utilizes the Ultima spells (or at least spell orbs that heavily resemble Ultima) during cutscenes and is cackling maniacally upon their exploding in three separate occasions: The first is when Terra first encounters him in order to get Terra to draw out her powers ("You're lying! Oh no. Look, here's another enemy for you!"). The second time is when he is actually fighting Terra, constantly bombarding her with spells while really losing it in laughter. The third time is during Shade Impulse shortly before fighting Terra, where he launches an Ultima at her, and yet again cackles insanely.
• The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Gun Runners' Arsenal adds the Mad Bomber perk. The perk lets you make bombs out of tin cans, more efficient versions of mines you already have, and more destructive versions of time bombs. The kicker, however, is the Fat Mine: a mini nuke rigged with a proximity fuse. Overkill achieved.
  • In-universe, there's the Boomers, a particularly trigger-happy faction who reside in Nellis Air Force Base and have an arsenal of explosives to themselves. They were originally from Vault 34, which had an overstocked armory and left the vault when they weren't allowed to use the really destructive stuff. They are fiercely territorial, with their response to anyone approaching them being mortar fire.
• Minecraft:
  • Creepers. Pretty much all they do is silently sneak up on you, hiss for a second and a half, and explode. If the explosion doesn't kill you, it'll do devastating damage to your health.
  • Ghasts (found only in the Nether), which throw fireballs at you.
  • If you have Mad Bomber tendencies yourself, you can blow stuff up with TNT or Fire Charges. Incidentally, to make these explosives, you need to get gunpowder by killing Ghasts or Creepers, the other two Mad Bombers in the game.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary crew got Shore "Pi" ("he's as irratiional as his namesake") Pibald — educated, very creative, complete nutjob — the sort of psycho who built an "ant farm" that actually consists of nanobots making high explosives. For no better reason than "I try to blow up my lab. He tries to stop me. So far he's winning."
• MS Paint Masterpieces has this interpretation of Crash Man, THE DESTROYER.
• Crazy Rhid the Gnoll in The Mansion of E.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has one of these — Gummer Groundpounder, gnome survivalist.
• Weregeek had a funny one — Abbie's Shadowrun character, Twitch.

Western Animation

• Slappy the Squirrel of Animaniacs has a tendency to solve problems with explosives.
• As with everything else, The Tick played this one for humor, and had a Split Personality completely Ax Crazy Talkative Loon bomber known as The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight (Yeah, baby!).
  • The Warlord CCG created the card Temb'w'bam as an homage to that character.
• Batman: The Animated Series had one episode where an obsessed fan of fictional superhero the Gray Ghost blackmailed the city with bomb threats. He acted under the nickname of a Gray Ghost villain, known, you guessed it, as "The Mad Bomber". Although when confronted (in Batman. The Gray Ghost example wasn't shown to the point of the villain being revealed), the villain seemed far more enthusiastic about using his beloved toys in his effort to get the money to keep his toy-collecting hobby going than about actually blowing things up.
• Batman Beyond had Mad Stan ("Mad" as in "Angry", not "Crazy"), voiced by Henry Rollins, an anarchist bomber who mostly served as a recurring punching bag for Terry in the Batman Cold Open. In Mad Stan's defense, he had a cause (Anti-Establishment-Rebellion) and followed it logically, at one point trying to blow up an empty (Save Terry) library. The 2010 miniseries comic would have us believe that Stan controls the explosives trade in Gotham.
• A rare case of this character type not being a villain: Vincenzo 'Vinny' Santorini from the Disney Animated Canon movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Vinny is a crewman who is often a little too eager to use find a way to use explosives to solve a problem. Of course they do mention they got him out of a Turkish prison.
• The Incredibles had an Enemy Mime who doubled as a Mad Bomber known as Bomb Voyage.
• A relatively minor case, but still dangerous: Chris from Total Drama Island. During the rock climbing and blind toboggan challenges, Chris sets up some explosives as distractions. The blind toboggan race didn't actually need the explosives, which is where Chris delivers the following quote...

Chris: (Detonates explosive) We had some explosives left over, and I just hate to waste...

• • All with a facial expression that is somewhere between a Psychotic Smirk and a Slasher Smile.
  • Then there's Izzy who blew up her mess hall at her summer camp, she loves blowing stuff up so much at one point she insists that the others call her "Explosivio".
• In a Porky Pig cartoon called The Blow-Out (1936), the criminal "Bomber" strategically blows up buildings with time bombs. While not explicitly mad, he cackles like a wicked witch and seems to have no goal beyond destruction ("Now let's see, what building today?").
• In the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon, Kletus Cassidy was depicted as one of these before he merged with the alien and became Carnage, since a Serial Killer was deemed too disturbing for a kid's show. He's every bit as mental as his comic book incarnation though, and in his introduction was willing to blow himself up alongside Spider-Man and the police.
• Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City: Somewhat in Trick AND TREAT. Crabapple Jam's creepy twin kids start their rampage during the episode by giving Strawberry Shortcake what she thinks is a present, but turns out to be a bomb that sprays green slime in her face. They later strike with an even bigger slime bomb (or trap) in her truck's oven.
• Cartoon Network's What a Cartoon Show (which debuted Cow and Chicken and The Powerpuff Girls) had a pair of shorts called Phish And Chip, about a shark and cat that worked for Big City's Bomb Squad. In the first cartoon, they had to deal with a shadowy Mad Bomber, while the second pitted the luckless fools against Blammo the Clown.
• Lugnut from Transformers Animated is a mad bomber plane. To wit, he is described in the fluff as having nigh-infinite missile payloads, which we see in his first encounter with the Autobots. On top of that, there's the Punch Of Kill Everything, which puts an explosive tip on the end of his fist that makes a crater when used.
• Heroic? example with Rico in "The Penguins of Madagascar."

Rico: "Kaboom kaboom kaboom?" Skiper: Rico, enough with the dynamite already.

• The main villain of Kung Fu Panda 2 was evil peacock who was obsessed with explosives.
• Dreadwing from Transformers Prime is more of a cold and calculating bomber compared to Lugnut further up the list; he prefers precisely placed explosive charges, which can be triggered remotely, by proximity, or by timed fuzes. He typically only enters a battle after mining basically the entire area; even when it seems like all of them have gone off, there's at least one more hidden one that he'll trigger to surprise his opponent.

Real Life

• Real life example: George Metesky, who planted 33 bombs (22 of which exploded) and injured a total of 15 people from 1940 to 1956, owes his title as the "Mad Bomber" to the Trope's name. He was motivated by being denied compensation when he waited too long to file a claim after an industrial accident. See The Other Wiki for details.
• Franz Fuchs, a racist terrorist guy who used a total of 28 bombs,killing four people and injuring 15. Laser-Guided Karma ensued when he attempted suicide to avoid arrest, losing both his hands to one of his own pipe bombs.
  • Also in real life: The Unabomber, also known by his true name Ted Taczynski, attacked academics and technologists with his bombs, publishing a manifesto called Industrial Society and Its Future. His book decried industrialisation and left-wing politics in order to prove Ludd Was Right.
  • Don't forget Luke Helder, he put pipe bombs in mailboxes to draw a smiley face across the United States. Caught before he could finish, though.
• Michael Bay. He hasn't killed anyone (for real), but he prides himself on the fact this his films are more practical effects than CGI (Transformers notwithstanding by necessity). That means, boys and girls, that 99% of the explosions you see in a Michael bay film are real. Just because he does it legally doesn't mean the trope is any less applicable.
• Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Similar to Michael Bay above.
• 1930s Terrorist Without A Cause Szilveszter Matuska, who finally admitted that blowing up trains just turned him on.
• Richard Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese to think of himself as one of these.