Bomb Queen is... well, she's Bomb Queen, and she's no heroine. She's a supervillain, and the four Bomb Queen miniseries so far have been supervillain comics - not just regular hero comics that focus on the villains, but a true inversion of the kind of storytelling that typifies the conventional superhero comic book. BQ - the character and the book - is harsh, callous, violent, morally repugnant, merciless, and for the most part without any redeeming qualities, no matter how much the heroes who get in her way (and the reader, at times) might look for them. Bomb Queen takes place in New Port City, which was once a regular city until the Four Queens moved in - Scream Queen, Drama Queen, Ice Queen and Bomb Queen. Having eliminated the competition, the other three Queens turned on BQ, but got a surprise when she turned the tables on them, killing them and leaving herself the only super-powered person left standing in New Port City. So she took it over, and for ten years has run the city as she sees fit - heroes are banned from the city on penalty of death, and what elsewhere is criminal activity is legal in New Port. Drugs, prostitution and slavery are rampant, but like Las Vegas taken to the extreme, instead of being a wasteland New Port City has become a criminal paradise, with a population only to happy to go about their daily lives with a side order of violent crime. Bomb Queen is, of course, satire - of America (most of the world, in fact), of conventional morality, of the hypocrisy of those who present themselves as moral paragons while hiding their little secrets - and that, of course, includes superheroes as well as senators and evangelists. BQ lives in a world where the good guys tell many white lies - difficult to argue that that's not our world, a lot of the time - and only she is honest enough to admit that she's an evil, vicious, sadistic, amoral bitch who does what she likes and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process. Writer and artist Jimmie Robinson walks a careful tightrope in maintaining Bomb Queen's inverted moral authority - she's a horrible person, but she's no hypocrite, and that provides the space for readers to side with her without being jolted out of it by the constant bombardment of repulsively evil acts she commits, and allows her city to commit, on a daily basis. If you found yourself siding with the heroes, it'd all fall apart - you'd want them to win, and their victory would mean the end of New Port City. BQ's victories are triumphs for evil, but they come at the expense of a different kind of evil, the insidious evil dressed up in a palatable exterior. That said, it goes without saying that you need a very robust sense of humour to handle Bomb Queen - it's not for the faint of heart. Bomb Queen has appeared in four miniseries from Shadowline, part of the Image Comics family, so far: the original, then 'Queen of Hearts', 'The Good, The Bad, and The Lovely', and 'Suicide Bomber', which progressively open up Bomb Queen's backstory, and reveal how she came to be and why she and her city are the way they are. The first three are currently available as trade paperbacks, the second including the one-shot Bomb Queen vs Blacklight issue, which takes place between the first and second miniseries, and sets up Blacklight's appearance in the third. BQ also recently guest-starred in an issue of Savage Dragon, and with other Image characters such as Invincible and Dynamo 5 making cameos in BQ issues, further crossover appearances are always a possibility.