Mad Bomber

"Did someone say bomb?"

"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! AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

— 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^note As CSI's Grissom once said, "The dirty little secret about bombs is how easy they are to make.".), 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, Nuke 'em, and Why Am I Ticking? Compare Demolitions Expert, a (usually) less psycho and more professional kind of character who is also very good with bombs, charges, and detonators; and Throw Down the Bomblet for grenades and other smaller explosives as a weapon of choice.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The commercial for Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! depicts Wario as a cackling maniac who gleefully talks to a lit bomb about "the damage we can do!" before repeatedly kissing the bomb while telling it that he loves it. Even when this predictably results in the bomb blowing up in his face, Wario's mood isn't dampened one bit.

Anime and Manga

• The 2003 series of Astro Boy has Kato, who combines this trope with Mad Artist. He calls his acts of destruction his "masterpieces."
• Nice Holystone from Baccano!, a rare female and good example, carries a good supply of homemade 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.
• Bleach brings us Bambietta Basterbine. With her designation as Sternritter E, "The Explode," and her Ax-Crazy personality, she has this trope in spades. Her powers allow her to turn anything into a bomb.
• Subverted in Case Closed; the bomber in the first Non-Serial Movie The Time-Bombed Skyscraper 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.
• Cowboy Bebop has one-episode villain Teddy Bomber, who likes to hide his bombs in teddy bears that he leaves at his target site. He's quickly eclipsed by the "serious" rivalry between Spike and Andy during the episode in question, "Cowboy Funk". 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...)
• Detective School 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 at the conclusion that he was his own god as he tried to control everything.
• Fairy Tail has Jackal, a member of the Nine Demon Gates of Tartarus. A cat-looking Ax-Crazy demon, he can use his curse to blow up anything he wants. Bonus points for having a landmine version of this ability as well.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Solf J. Kimblee, also known as the Crimson or Red Lotus Alchemist is this in both of his incarnations: The original manga and Brotherhood incarnation 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 Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), 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.
• Minene, the 9th Diary Holder of Future Diary, 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.
• '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 material 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 a living.
• In The Hating Girl, one early chapter features a bomber who attacks schools. He shows up again near the end of the manga and is revealed to be one of the students at the main characters' school, who hates "normal" people because of the horn on his head.
• In Heat Guy J, the dangerously-unhinged young mob boss Clair Leonelli really loves hand grenades and other explosives, which he refers to as "fireworks." Another one-time (but almost as unhinged) character is blowing up buildings...just so he can clear space for his photography projects, and distracting the citizens of Judoh with trading cards of pretty girls he's photographed candidly.
• The Greed Island arc of Hunter × Hunter features Genthru, the "Bomb Devil" or "Demon Bomber", whose Nen abilities are based on explosions.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Kira Yoshikage may not have a love for blowing things up, but he still is a seriously disturbed Serial Killer, and all of his stand abilities involve blowing things up while removing all traces of his target, ironically making his stand perfect for keeping a low profile by destroying evidence.
  • Oyecomova in Part 7 of Jojo on the other hand very much exemplifies this trope as a Neapolitan terrorist whose skills with explosives manifest into a superpower to insert ethereal pins into objects to convert them into makeshift bombs. He's one of the very few enemies that aren't after the MacGuffin, instead he wants to kill Gyro simply for being a servant of the King of Naples, who he wants to assassinate after taking out Gyro.
• Ultimate Pyrotechnician Ted Chikatilo from Killer Killer, a member of Ultimate Despair known as "the Million Killer". An unrepentant pyromaniac, Ted's only calling in life is to turn people into "beautiful fireworks".
• Megumin from KonoSuba is surprisingly one of the Only Sane Girls of the main cast. However, she knows only one spell: Explosion, a massively destructive spell that she can only cast once before collapsing into a useless heap due to the sheer mana cost, but has a compulsive need to cast every single day even if she doesn't actually have any enemies to use it on, and her obsession with the spell even borders on sexual at times.
• 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.
• 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 is to blow up things; the fact that he can get paid for it by Akatsuki is just extra. He doesn't mind Sasori having differing opinions so much, but he can't stand his art being treated with indifference by Itachi and Sasuke, the latter of whom finally beats him. Ultimately, he decides to blow himself up, trying to take Sasuke with him- not for defeating him, mind you, but for the whole indifference thing. Sasuke has an Oh, Crap! reaction, so... that was a small victory for Deidara... supposedly?
• Gokudera from Reborn! (2004) 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.
• 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.
• YuYu 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.

Comic Books

• 'Twitch', one of the Carnival of Killers, who pursues Batman in the Batman vs Predator II mini-series. Comes closest of all the killers to actually offing Batman.
• One Captain Klutz adventure has the eponymous superhero dealing with Mervin the Mad Bomber, who is blowing up buildings all over the city, and is also a Master of Disguise.
• Dynamite Joe. Observe. The answer, obviously, is "because he can't duct tape a dynamite stick to a bullet and mortars are no fun".
• Firestorm (DC Comics): 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 The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #30, Indy is forced into an unwilling partnership with IRA agent Michael Cobb. Cobb's preferred weapon is dynamite, and he wears an overcoat lined with sticks of it. He even refers to explosions as his 'calling card'.
• G.I. Joe:
  • In the 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.
  • Before being revamped into a ninja, Snake-Eyes was a rather bomb-crazy commando with a penchant for using ten times the C4 he really should. In the GI Joe: Declassified mini-series, he even uses it to make coffee.^note You can actually use C4 to make coffee as it can be burned without exploding. US soldiers in The Vietnam War were known to do this. However, it does give off toxic fumes when burning so it's not recommended.
• 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."
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Green Goblin and Hobgoblin of Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery, whose main method of attack is throwing bombs disguised as pumpkins.
  • More notably is the supervillain Nitro, who can self-detonate and then reform himself. A chemically enhanced use of his power caused the destruction of Stamford, killing over 600 people and the New Warriors, setting off a series of events that led fellow Mad Bomber Norman Osborn into power.
• Surprisingly enough, Galeazzo Musolesi from Sturmtruppen can't resist blowing up any train he sees... Following with blaming the enemy or saboteurs even if everyone saw him.
• In Tinus Trotyl, an old Dutch comic, the eponymous 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.
• The Wild Storm: Kenesha is a long-lived alien in human guise with a savant streak, normally appearing calm and composed... until the subject of "explody" comes up, and she starts grinning like a loon (and, according to Cole Cash, giggling in a very creepy fashion).

Fan Works

• Distortions (Symphogear): Caprice Calcattera, a member of the White Unit of the Four Horsemen, is their explosives expert and most of the time it seems she only cares about creating more powerful explosives and creating chaos them.
• Bakuda of How To Drill Your Way Through Your Problems is in fine form, except now she has a giant robot. She's also much nicer than in canon.
• Mega Man Reawakened has Top Man and Crash Man.
• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: Nyx, Zim's new minion introduced in Season 2, is literally a Bomb Throwing Anarchist who likes blowing stuff up in the name of revolution.
• The titular character of Old Man Henderson is schizophrenic, has The Anarchist's Cookbook memorized, killed Hastur the Great Old One with a HOCKEY RINK packed full of explosives, and at one point managed to avoid getting charged with arson by blowing up the rubble of the building he had torched so thoroughly there were no traces of his presence left.
• In Queen of All Oni, a Jackie Chan Adventures fanfiction, Left, one of Queen Jade's two sentient Shadowkhan servants, has a habit of using dynamite as a weapon. When asked why, he says "I like the boom."

Films — Animation

• 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 find a way to use explosives to solve a problem. Of course, they do mention they got him out of a Turkish prison. The tale of how he grew to find his love of explosions definitely paints him as a less insane, more functional variant of these.
  Vinny: Anyway, I think there was this leak next door of gas, or whatever, BOOM! No more Chinese laundry. Blew me right through the front window. It was like a sign from God, I found myself in that boom.
• The Incredibles has an Enemy Mime who doubles as a Mad Bomber known as Bomb Voyage.
• The main villain of Kung Fu Panda 2, Lord Shen, was an evil peacock who was obsessed with explosives.

Films — Live-Action

• One of these appears briefly in the horror-comedy Alligator; the policeman protagonist ends up using the man's confiscated explosive device to destroy the eponymous reptile.
• Blown Away has Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones), an Irish terrorist who was imprisoned at the time of The Troubles. He does not care about any cause but just loves to blow things up, and is a sociopath who's eager for revenge against a former comrade who instead used his Demolitions Expert skills to become a Bomb Disposal unit cop in Boston.
• Casper: A Spirited Beginning: Bill Case, the professional bomber that Tim eventually hires to blow up Applegate Mansion, is very eager to finish the job. He won't even listen when Tim tries to call off the bombing when he learns Chris is locked in the house, and when Sheila manages to knock him out of the tree he's hiding in and take the detonator, he gleefully informs her that it makes no difference since there's a timer on the bomb itself as well.
• Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker's father was the "Alphabet Bomber", who bombed buildings in alphabetical order. He got the electric chair.
• Washington in Dead in Tombstone. When asked if he has enough dynamite, he replies "There is never enough dynamite".
  • Craven in Dead Again in Tombstone is very fond of dynamite and gets a look of manic glee on his face when Boomer instructs him to blast the chest out of the stagecoach.
• The reason why Christian is in the mental institute of The Dead Pit is because he developed these tendencies in the army.
• Firefly in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. He even gets a brief speech on how much he likes blowing stuff up.
• Rocket, from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), although he likes just about any big weapon. "That's for if things get really hardcore. Or if you wanna blow up moons."
• The 1991 western film, The Gunslinger has an MB bank robber henchman known as ‘Crazy’ Stick Callahan. He blows open bank vaults and is always eager to use his dynamite. At an outlaw campsite:
  Stick Callahan: You know Mcclure, one of these days I’m gonna take a stick of dynamite and put it right in your campfire.
  Bank robber Dawson Mcclure: (Gun barrel on Callahan’s chin) That’ll be the last thing you’ll ever do boy.
  Callahan: Okay. Okay.
• In Justice League, a group of self-described "reactionary" terrorists (the leader of which is played by Michael McElhatton) attacks the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court of England and Wales in London to bring humanity "back to the Dark Ages, to the safety of Holy Fear". They intend to blow it up, but Wonder Woman shows up just in time to ruin their plan.
• The villain in Quick is setting off a series of explosions across the city. There is a definite method to his madness, however.
• Rakka. Nosh is a pyromaniac and bomb maker for La Résistance to an Alien Invasion—not that he has any problem with the latter as instead of being locked up as a dangerous maniac, he can now burn or blow up whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He knows the Resistance need him, and part of his payment involves providing him with The Bait to set bigger booby traps; people who are too sick to fight so can be expended in suicide attacks.
• The 1996 film version of The Secret Agent has an especially chilling example (played by Robin Williams), who seems to hate everyone, saying morality should be based on death instead of life. In the end, he blows himself up in a crowded street simply due to his annoyance at the people around him by using a homemade bomb he's had strapped onto his body for the entire story beforehand.
• In Serial Killing 4 Dummys, Casey's best friend Amil has an unhealthy obsession with C4, and keeps suggesting blowing stuff up as a solution. When he and Casey need to break into the school, he reveals that he carries a homemade-shaped charge with him at all times. But he has forgotten how he wired it...
• Sky Bandits: Barney is a Demolitions Expert, but he usually uses too much dynamite. When he and Luke are robbing banks, he usually winds up blowing up the bank rather than blowing the safe open.
• Small Soldiers has one: Nick Nitro of the Commando Elite. Demolition is his mission, and he can make explosives out of things like WD-40.
• Howard Payne, the Big Bad of Speed. He is actually described as such during a news report, and he finds that very amusing.
• The first year twins in the 2007 St Trinians movie.
• Dennis Hopper played another villainous Mad Bomber in Ticker, seemingly an allusion to his Speed role. Being made by the infamous Albert Pyun, the film is made by stitching together various explosion clips from the cutting room floor throughout Pyun's career.
• 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."
• Cody, the special effects guy from Tropic Thunder.

Literature

• 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 Stuff Blowing Up. (Rumor goes on to add that he blew up the seminary). Praise the Emperor that the Guard gave him a productive outlet for his hobbies.
• The 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".
• 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." They also wanted to blow open the cargo holds on some captured ships. Geary asked if the Engineers wanted help from the Marines. They were 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.
• Most of the sappers serving in the Malazan army in the Malazan Book of the Fallen 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. This is 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.
• Renegades: Ingrid Thompson, better known as The Detonator, has the ability to create explosives that she can blow up with her mind, and really, really loves to use them, preferably to ruin Renegades' day.
• The Secret Agent: The Professor is this, being a sociopath and keeping a bomb on him that could kill anyone near him.
• 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.
• Trashcan Man from Stephen King's The Stand is a pyromaniac tinkerer and one of the best Mad Bombers in fiction.
• Teen Power Inc.: In Danger in Rhyme, the villain blows up places that rhyme with the lyrics in the song "This Old Man" However, the bombings are only meant to cover up some Insurance Fraud.

Live-Action TV

• 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 fills him with joy. He even uses a landmine as a grenade when escaping the cops.
• Brainiac: Science Abuse: Much of its crew enjoys blowing things up.
• Burn Notice:
  • This is the hat of Fiona Glennane. 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.^note Sadly, this is Truth in Television. Don't worry. Like any good villain of the week, he gets his by the end of the episode.
  • Lastly, there was a villain of the week who thought he was a Vigilante Man but was actually more like an unhinged Knight Templar. Compounding the problem was the fact that the bomber had no problem with harming potential innocents, and that he used radio detonators that could be set off by other radios, such as a passing ambulance or cop car.
• 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 and the 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 land development by a software firm that went under shortly after it started, his daughter died due to losing his healthcare benefits which led to his divorce. That is, until you learn that one of his victims was a store employee who didn't refund a shower radio one day after the return date and he also 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. (That bomb ended up maiming a totally innocent person when it went off.)
• Criminal Minds:
  • Adrian Bale, "The Boston Shrapnel Bomber". He was responsible for killing 6 FBI agents and a hostage after Jason Gideon's attempt to negotiate failed. This caused Gideon to take a medical leave until the events of the pilot of the series.
  • David Walker from "Won't Get Fooled Again". A Florida-based con artist turned copycat of Bale, his first victim was a woman who realized the antique he had sold to her was a forgery. Later, he began to send bombs to random people to throw the police off.
• Justin Bieber had a guest role on CSI as a serial killer and serial bomber.
• Mac Taylor and his team pursue a mad bomber in the CSI: NY episode "Charge of this Post." He was using bombs to prove how unprepared the city was to defend itself against such terrorism.
• Lance Corporal Jones from Dad's Army mentions in one episode (where the platoon has 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.
• Doctor Who: Ace, perhaps the only heroic example of this trope. She carried around a backpack full of homemade 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 their 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, I do what I'm told.
    The Doctor: Excellent! Blow up that vehicle.
  • ...and again in "Remembrance of the Daleks"...
    The Doctor: [pointing at Ace's backpack] You're not carrying any Nitro 9 explosives in there?
    Ace: No.
    [later, when a Dalek appears and starts shooting everything in sight...]
    The Doctor: Ace! Give me some of that Nitro 9 you're not carrying!
• The Flashpoint series finale features Marcus Faber, who plants bombs at random locations around the city because he wants people to "realize" that no one is looking out for them, culminating in a plan to bomb the triage center where victims from earlier attacks are being treated. The SRU manage to stop some of his plans, including the triage center bombing, but four bombs still go off, to devastating effect.
• The Fugitive (2020): The real culprit is revealed to be an angry demolitions expert who was injured and denied his deserved compensation from a wealthy businessman. After this, his life fell apart, losing his job, wife, and child. He bombs a train the businessman was riding, murdering him and about twenty bystanders. Later he bombs the courthouse for the courts ruling for the businessman. The last target is the insurance company which denied his claims, but that gets stopped. A viewer can sympathize about his grievances, but he deliberately targeted innocent people with no part in what happened to him, aiming for maximum casualties, which puts him beyond the pale.
• Game of Thrones: Cersei outdoes the Mad King and actually manages to "burn them all" when she blows her King's Landing enemies in a wildfire plot.
• 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 one episode, he also complains about how his bombs were a minute late going off. Guy really loves explosives. Of course, this is played for comedy since Lebeau had to quickly snatch a file from the room.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: After his father is murdered on Luther Mahoney's orders and both Mahoney and the hitman get off scot-free, Ben Roh starts using bombs to kill everyone he blames for his father's death and the trial's verdict. Ironically, he never goes after Luther; when Kellerman asks him why, Ben admit he was saving him for last.
• Prometheus from the MacGyver (1985) episode "The Prometheus Syndrome": a psychopathic arsonist leaving firebombs around the city seemingly at random.
• MythBusters. They just blow up everything they can.
  "The only thing that separates us from a couple 14-year-old pyromaniacs is ballistic glass."
• Originally in Power Rangers Turbo, Divatox specialized in "implosion devices" (used once in the previous series, where Billy claimed it was "like a bomb but nastier") and would often instruct the Monster of the Week to plant them. She abandoned this strategy about halfway through the series.
• 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.
• The Punisher (2017): Lewis Wilson is an ex-Army soldier who has crippling PTSD. It's so bad that he tries to get a job with Billy Russo's private military contractor firm Anvil to go back into combat situations. A series of bad experiences culminate in him building bombs and setting them off at several government installations in Manhattan. He then targets New York Bulletin reporter Karen Page for saying negative things about him. Frank rescues her, and Lewis subsequently kills himself with a suicide vest.
• 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 catchphrase? KABOOM!
  Edgar: These new tractors that they're buildin' these days, they're very brittle.
• Captain Gunpowder from Wild Boys. He has the nickname for a reason.
• Veronica Mars: In season 4, Neptune is plagued by a series of bombings committed by a deranged serial killer who even starts playing Criminal Mind Games with the authorities. It turns out that there's actually two separate bombers: the first, Perry Walsh, was hired by "Big" Dick Casablancas to further a scam, the second, Penn Epner, is a copycat who started his own series of bombings based on what he mistakenly believed to be the original bomber's modus operandi.
• Yancy Derringer: In "Nightmare on Bourbon Street", a mysterious mad bomber steals explosives and threatens to blow up the entire city of New Orleans.

Music

• Doctor Steel:
  • "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.'
  • Also, "Drop da Bomb".
    Tick tick ticking time bomb on a chain in a padded room/Kaboom zoom and I'm out of here soon
    Well gosh darn, and it feels so right/Setting off explosives on a Saturday night
• The Megas: Bomb Man's entire song is about how he intends to blow everything up. The Megas make some Robot Masters very sympathetic, and make you feel bad for them when Mega Man eventually kills them; Bomb Man is the other kind.
  You lit a fuse inside me, and now my instincts guide me through, to what I must do... (CUE EXPLOSION!)
• Tendon Levey's "A Boy and His Bomb".
• Keith Moon from The Who. He was said to have ordered hundreds of firecrackers when the band first toured America, proceeding to spend the next several years working his way through them. His love of pyrotechnics became part of the band's act, with his drum kit being rigged with explosives (as seen in a famous incident on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour), but he was particularly fond of dropping cherry bombs down toilets.

Pinball

• Heist!: Downplayed with "Leo" Myshkin. He's a professional demolitions expert who seems relatively mentally stable, but he tends to be eager to blow things up and sometimes laughs heartily when they do.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Show boasts a more comedic example in Crazy Harry. He carries a detonator on his person at all times, and if, Earth forbid, you should say an explosives-related word in his earshot, he'll pop up, ask "Did somebody say '[insert word here]'?" and then push the plunger, cackling like the maniac he is. Sometimes, Harry uses his detonator for musical purposes; for example, his climactic duet with Jean Stapleton of "I'm Just Wild About Harry" with his explodaphone, or "Chanson D'Amour."
• The Sandra Bullock episode of Muppets Tonight had a parody of Howard Payne who was simply called "the Mad Bomber". The bomb would explode if the ratings were under 50. He turned out to be Sandra Bullock in disguise.

Tabletop Games

• Blood Bowl has the Goblin star player Bomber Dribblesnot, whose gimmick and sole focus in life is cheerfully blowing other players up with his big sack of cartoon-style bombs.
• The Jammers of Feng Shui prefer destroying feng shui sites to capturing them, their reasoning being that no one deserves to be enslaved by the forces of Chi as the people of 2056 are, and that only by blowing up every feng shui site in existence will humanity truly be free. They love blowing up these sites so much that their Battle Cry is "BLOW THINGS UP! BLOW THINGS UP!" In the second edition, all of that has changed. When the Jammers detonated the weapon known as the Chi Bomb to destroy every feng shui site in the Future juncture, not only did they wipe out the Buro and the Architects of the Flesh that they originally formed to fight, but also 97% of humanity in that juncture, as well as unleashing serious environmental devastation across the world with the eradication of the future world's Chi. The Jammers since changed their tune, seeking to capture enough sites to try to undo this devastation, preferably in a way that prevents the Buro and the Architects from ever rising again.
• 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.
• Durgen Madhammer, a Psycho for Hire from the Iron Kingdoms, is this to such a degree that he rarely works for anyone twice because all but the most demented employers see the carnage he leaves behind and decides not to try that again.
• Papa Loco and Willie the Demolitionist of Malifaux are both obsessed with explosives, lobbing sticks of dynamite as their primary attack. Willie has the excuse that it's his job, but his disregard for safety measures extends to pushing around a wheelbarrow full of dynamite. Papa Loco puts the emphasis on "mad," going about in an unstrapped straightjacket and frequently damaging himself and his allies as much as his enemies.
• The Alchemist class in Pathfinder. Tossing off various Trick Bombs is one of their two main class features (the other being drinking Psycho Serum). Some archetypes (class modifications) drop this aspect, but on the other hand, others dial it up. The "mad" part comes from alchemists generally being "For Science!" types prone to drinking dangerous concoctions; thanks to their Mutagen even the sanest have an extremely pronounced Jekyll & Hyde syndrome. And that's not counting the massive potential for self-experimentation.
• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Baron Blade's alternate version is Mad Bomber Blade, who is planting explosives and traps around the environment. He dispenses with the normal minions and defensive systems his regular version employs. Instead, anytime his deck draws a minion or device with hit points, they instead go underneath his villain card and they increase the damage he inflicts every turn, representing the bombs he has planted. When he takes enough damage to flip to his other side, all the cards he's collected detonate, dealing even more damage to the players.
  • The Bomb Specialist from Sergeant Steel's deck is effectively the Demoman as an attractive woman but with even less self-control. In the storyline, she actually ends up killing her entire team by building a bomb she can't turn off (as seen on the Incapacitated side of Sergeant Steel's character cards).
• Orks of Warhammer 40,000 love dakka and things that go boom (accuracy fully optional). Within Ork society, two sub-groups epitomise this trope - the Stikkbommas, who love blowing anything up with their trademark tin-can-of-explosives-on-a-stick grenades, and the Tankbustaz, who love blowing up enemy tanks and vehicles more than anything else. All Orks tend towards the obsessive and monomaniacal - these are just the ones whose mania happens to be bombs.

Video Games

• Blue Archive has two. One of them, Millennium student Akane, views 'cleaning' to involve prominent use of explosives (with the costs to repair the damage often annoying Yuuka). The other, suspended student Wakamo, is a straight-up anarchist.
• Bomb Club: Out of the 4 club members, Blake is the most eager to make things go boom. She even made the Bomberbot so that she doesn't have to deal with the tedious process of safety set-up, and can just blow things up after the robot does all the legwork.
• 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 Generation manages to combine this trope with Trigger-Happy.
• Borderlands:
  • Borderlands has Brick the Berserker, whose whole play-style involves getting right into the face of the stupid bandit who shot him and blowing him into meaty chunks with a rocket launcher. He's not the nicest of guys when he's mad and he can blow you up with just his fists.
  • Borderlands 2:
    • Tiny Tina is 13 years old, lives on Pandora, and is totally off her nut. She's also the most proficient bomb maker on the planet, personally recommended by Roland himself. She becomes friends with Brick as they share a mutual love of explosives.
    • One of the game's earliest boss fights is against Bandit explosive expert Boom and his midget shotgunner brother Bewm. Boom loves the word "boom" and shouts it madly throughout the fight. When killed, they both drop several grenade mods
    • Breakout Mook Character Krieg the Psycho has several skills related to explosives; most of them relate to improving his grenade abilities and encouraging him to use them more, but by far the most memorable is his skill "Light The Fuses." This changes his 'downed' state from crawling around slowly with a gun to running full pelt while carrying lit dynamite. He may elect to throw sticks of dynamite to score the necessary kill for revival, but most of the time the best solution is to charge blindly at an enemy and self-detonate just like the suicide psychos. This actually counts as a revival kill and Krieg returns to life on the spot.
    • Torgue is an entire company dedicated to producing explosives and guns that blow shit up and is run by Mister Torgue High-Five Flexington. Torgue guns use gyrojets in their ammo to have that extra explosion to every shot and grenades and class mods to blow more shit up.
    • Axton the Commando, who loves showboating and action, uses explosives heavily in his "Gunpowder" skill tree and has multiple class mods that boost his grenades and how many he can carry.
• General Rodall "Demo" Juhziz from Command & Conquer: Generals certainly qualifies. Also, most explosive-oriented GLA units seem to have a manic streak in their personalities, when it comes to explosives. Terrorists who blow themselves up, Bomb trucks who do the same... And SCUD launchers who are not so self-destructive, but nonetheless love their explosives to bits.
• Crash Bandicoot: Ripper Roo. Any time you face him, you can expect plenty of TNT crates everywhere. Luckily they have a fuse, so you can blow him up with his own bombs safely. In the first game, the explosive crates in Ripper Roo's stage are just an environmental hazard; but in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Roo intentionally uses them to attack Crash, and also uses the more dangerous Nitro crates.
• Miniboss Roger Red Ant in Croc 2.
• The Mad Dok unit in Dawn of War is capable of dropping a bomb that deals ridiculous amounts of damage and Knock Back, 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.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: Liam is known as the Bombing Demon, for his attitude and use of machines that could wipe out the entire Gehena is not deactivated.
• In Destiny 2: Forsaken, one of the Scorned Barons is Kaniks, whose title is "The Mad Bomber." He's a chortling Psychopathic Manchild who chucks grenades and leaves mines everywhere.
• 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 Final Fantasy subseries. 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 on 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.
• Donkey Kong Country Returns:
  • Stu◊ 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.
  • The Kowalees in the Golden Temple level frequently toss bombs at the Kongs, who have to toss them back at them to defeat them.
• DOTA 2 has the Techies, originally based on the goblin sapper unit from Warcraft III when the game was still a mod. They're insanely eager to blow up both things and people. The backstory mentions they've wiped out at least three towns entirely. Naturally, they're more than happy to put their talents to work on the battlefield and will cackle with glee every time someone dies in their minefields.
• Dworkin Glavonak in the Dragon Age: Origins – 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.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • The 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, more destructive versions of time bombs, cheap grenades from laser gun batteries, and nasty radioactive tin can bombs that use Nuka-Cola as fissile material. 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 (though they at least tend to keep away from using nukes). They are fiercely territorial, with their response to anyone approaching them being mortar fire.
• Klee from Genshin Impact is an enthusiastic little girl who loves lobbing her homemade bombs around the environment without a care in the world. The other Knights of Favonius have to keep her in check so that she doesn't create too much damage. Even after being punished for her destructiveness many times, she never stops creating and using her explosives with gusto.
• Architect from Girls' Frontline. While spacier, livelier and less malicious than most examples, she loves blowing things up, whether it's with a Jupiter Cannon emplacement or her mini-nuke launcher.
• One mission in Grand Theft Auto III involves fighting a legion of madmen high on Spank with bombs strapped to their chests.
• In Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft:
  • There is a card called Mad Bomber. It is, of course, a goblin who throws out three explosives at random targets (friendly or otherwise) when he is played. Also, the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion introduced the Madder Bomber (which is used as the image for this page), a bigger version of the Mad Bomber who throws out SIX random bombs on summon. The Deadmines added an even bigger version called Maddest Bomber, who throws TWELVE bombs.
  • Goblins as a whole have a running theme of throwing bombs in the game. About two-thirds of all goblins involve explosives, usually with an element of randomness. This is carried over and exaggerated from their Warcraft depiction pre-Cataclysm.
  • Kobolds & Catacombs introduced a kobold named Pathmaker Hamm who's obsessed with explosives. He's a Dungeon Run boss and most of his fight involves throwing out bombs everywhere.
• Jagged Alliance. It's something of an occupational hazard when you're hiring mercenaries because all the sane Demolitions Experts have the option of taking nice safe civilian jobs knocking down derelict buildings or doing visual effects for Hollywood movies instead of getting shot at in some Banana Republic (there was a similar problem with finding competent medics). In the second game, after the Association of International Mercenaries has become more legitimate and reputable 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. To wit:
  • Fidel Dahan is not only insubordinate, but also a potential Team Killer (if working alongside Hurl Cutter), and expresses a wish to be reincarnated as a crow so he can eat the eyes of the dead.
  • Lesley "Smoke" Peterson is a compulsive prankster who is famous for repeatedly short-fusing explosives (more often than not endangering lives in doing so) to troll people. This led to his absence from the second game, as some easily-missed text on AIM's in-game website indicates one of his short-fuse pranks got him quite literally Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Bruce "Skitz" Bonner takes his nickname from his failed attempts to spell his disorder and will leave the team in disgust if not allowed to kill enough enemies. Skitz is explicitly only kept in roster because the other explosives experts they could find were worse.
  • Marty "Kaboom" Moffat stood too close to one detonation too many, causing him serious brain damage, and is now basically on the mental level of a four-year-old with a savant-like ability with explosives.
  • Ernie "Red" Spragg is even described by the narration as a "mad, mumbling Scotsman".
  • Larry Roachburn is good with explosives but also uses his body as a testbed for every single psychoactive chemical known to mankind, and some he invented himself.
  • Russell Hunter defies the trope and even markets himself as "the sane explosives guy".
  • Barry Unger is mentioned to be a sane and well-adjusted young man, but he is also very young and comes from a new breed of explosives experts that learned the trade from books rather than hard-won experience.
  • Trevor Colby is another subversion, being sane, well-adjusted, and very good with things that go "boom!".
• 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.
• In the Kirby series, the main representative for the Bomb Ability, Poppy Bros, is a Perpetual Smiler, giving this sort of vibe.
• Ziggs from League of Legends is a ranged magic user whose spells consist entirely of throwing various bombs at his opponents. And while his moral compass is more or less functional, his obsession with detonations is downright unhealthy, down to constant insane cackling. Even those he tries to commercialize he ends up overdoing to the point of uselessness (like the stuff he sold to a man that wanted to clean his chimney, which removed the filth, the chimney itself, and a chunk of the whole house). Hextech Mayhem even reveals that he considers explosions a form of art, to the point of refusing to team up with Heimerdinger, due to him considering them science.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: There's a unique Elite Mook actually named the Mad Bomber. It used to be part of Richard's loyal servants before going berserk. It hides within a network of holes, and throws bombs at Link from a distance; these bombs have a shorter fuse than Link's.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Some rats constantly throw bombs at Link. According to their figurine entry in the Nintendo Gallery, they're called Bombchus (and are retroactively the inspiration for the mouse-shaped bombs that appear in other games in the series, even borrowing the name).
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures: Dark Link is not only called the trope word for word by one NPC, but he spends a third of the stages magicking up and dropping bombs on you that are half the size of the screen.
• LittleBigPlanet: Create Mode has Impact Bombs, Trigger Bombs and Missiles are your friends for blowing up stuff, and you can drop as many as you want. There are also enemies and bosses who drop bombs as well.
• Mega Man:
  • Bomb Man from 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.
  • Grenade Man from Mega Man 8 loved explosions so much that he secretly wanted to get blown up himself because he's masochistic. He cries, "That felt good!" when he explodes and dies.
  • Blast Man from Mega Man 11 is so fond of explosions, he even tends to say that explosion is indeed art. Not to mention that his lines contain loads of bomb-related puns.
• 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'.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: There are two bosses with this behavior: Bomb Guardian (which attacks Samus with her own Morph Ball Bombs) and Power Bomb Guardian (which attacks with Power Bombs). They received these powerups from the Ings that stole Samus's gear early in the game and love spamming them during battle.
• Minecraft:
  • Creepers. 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
  • The Wither. This thing is a killing machine and is a really very big threat to all players and mobs in the game. They summon Wither Bombs at the players or every living mob it sees in the game.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Brachydios, a Brute Wyvern introduced in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, attacks with a volatile slime produced in its mouth. This slime explodes a few seconds after it's been placed in the floor or the opponent's body, causing a lot of damage (the hunter has to either soak themselves in water, use a cleanser, or repeatedly roll with the dodge move to remove the slime until it's too late). 4 Ultimate introduces a variant in G Rank, Raging Brachydios, which not only is even more explosion-happy but uses a slime that explodes at a much faster rate (this includes the slime that covers part of its body).
  • Berserk Tetsucabra, a subspecies of Tetsucabra introduced in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Whereas the regular species unearths rocks (or snowballs, when fought in the Frozen Seaway) and throws them at the player or crushes them near them to inflict damage, the subspecies uses its body's drastically high internal temperature to ignite the rocks they're scooping from the ground. These rocks will explode after only a few seconds, and this is how Berserk Tetsucabra will attack during the whole hunting fight except when it's trying to Ground Pound the hunter with either a large amphibian jump or a suplex-like side pound (these moves are borrowed from the main species). For extra difficulty, this is one of the first monsters introduced in the game's G Rank, when the player is still starting to play in this Harder Than Hard phase.
• Kongōtō Bosatsu "Akari" from Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- is a firework specialist, and while not insane or villainous, he has an unhealthy obsession with setting off fireworks and doesn't care where he's firing them, enough to make his setting them off indoors a Running Gag.
• Overwatch character Junkrat is a criminally insane Australian whose preferred method of mayhem is with explosives. Three-fourths of his moveset as a playable character are related to explosives; a grenade launcher, a landmine, and a player-guided explosive built into a truck tire. (The fourth is a leg-hold trap that combos really well with the landmine). His Heroes of the Storm version kicks it up a notch, giving him a Suicide Attack you can optionally take instead of RIP-Tire. The ability involves him hopping aboard a custom rocket and crashing directly into the ground.
• Paperboy has a red-jumpsuited crook who deposits a trail of Cartoon Bombs.
• The Jack-in-the-Box zombie in Plants vs. Zombies wears a straightjacket, giggles like a loon and has a crazed smile on his face while carrying a jack-in-the-box with an explosive surprise.
• 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!"
• Radiant Arc: Kagan is an evil jester working for the Morians in order to wipe out humanity, despite once being a human. Almost all of his attacks consist of throwing bombs, some of which can inflict the burn ailment on party members.
• Red Alert 2:
  • The Crazy Ivans deployed by the Soviets - they can wire anything, even your own troops, to explode with their endless supply of dynamite. The Crazy Ivan is the only unit in the game that has the pretty descriptive AttackCursorOnFriendlies attribute in the game files.
  Crazy Ivan: "Here, hold this!
  • 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 Commandos can do it even better: They're teleporting Navy SEALs, so they use classic short-fuse C4 instead of slow bombs.
  • The Libyan faction in skirmish and multiplayer has the Demolition Truck as its unique unit - essentially the same as the GLA's Bomb Truck in Generals, but without the ability to disguise itself as another vehicle.
• RosenkreuzStilette: Zorne Sepperin, who happens to have a bomb-making machine in her Power Fist. And is not afraid to use it!
• Nassir the Boom-Boom Man of The Secret World is a comparatively benign example of this, in the sense that he's an irrepressibly-optimistic supporter of the heroes... who just so happens to enjoy playing catch with live hand-grenades, dancing around with loaded armaments, and waxing rhapsodic over blowing up enemy installations and the "happy ending and musical number" that will ensue.
• Serious Sam Has the "Beheaded Kamikaze" who are suicide bombers with 2 classic-looking bombs in their hands. The kicker? They still scream despite having no heads (let alone much of a neck) which would have mouths in order to facilitate screaming!
• Plague Knight, from Shovel Knight. He shares this trait with his partner-in-crime and love interest Mona. A Giggling Villain and Mad Bomber par excellence, he is clearly having an absolute blast as he hurls alchemical bombs everywhere. His playable campaign shows him invading the Armored Outpost basically just because he can. However, playing through both Plague of Shadows and Specter of Torment reveals that he actually isn't very crazy; he was forced into joining the Order Of No Quarter, legitimately loves Mona, and was the one who actually blew up the Tower of Fate, not Shovel Knight.
• 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 that walk, fly planes, and drive cars! One of her super attacks is to produce a Giant bomb called Fat Man.
• Stalnik, the main antagonist in the story mode of Speed Runners has the player constantly defusing bombs set all over New Rush City, including bombs in his own lair!
• Luke Carlyle from the Spider-Man 3 game becomes this after his company is shut down, causing him to become obsessed with bombing New York City out of revenge.
• The Gremlins in Spiral Knights have levels called 'Deconstruction Zones'. Guess what they use to deconstruct the level.
  • The Gremlin Bombers are aggravating to fight: they drop bombs with a time-dependent fuse, drop bombs when hit (usually at Ironclaw and Darkfang levels), and just before they throw a HANDFUL of the damn things, they laugh at you and a speech bubble over their head says 'Catch!' . And the bombs have a chance of stunning you, restricting your movement speed so you have less chance to get out of the blast radius.
  • Even friendly Gremlins aren't immune to the urge to blow things up:
  Punch and Vise wanted me to state for the record that they did not 'blow up' Vatel's recipe shop, but rather that it 'exploded while they were inside it.'
• 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.
• Sunset Riders have the Smith Brothers, a pair of explosive-crazy psychopaths holding up a saloon and trying to blow up everyone who attempts entering. While one of the pair uses conventional bombs, the other uses Molotov Cocktails that leaves behind a fire that causes additional damage, and is the more dangerous of the two. You fight them both at once and if you win, the last Smith bro. will blow up himself.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 2: Mouser, the boss of Worlds 1 and 3^note 1 and 6 in the Advance remake, and also in World 5 in Doki Doki Panic, is a maniac rodent that wears Cool Shades and throws bombs at Mario and his friends like there's no tomorrow.
  • Super Mario Odyssey: Hariet, one of the Broodals, attacks by throwing bombs, and has an ability where she flies around while dropping bombs, laughing crazily in the process.
  • Super Mario RPG: Punchinello is a crazed purple lunatic who takes residence in the Moleville mines, Punchinello is capable of summoning waves after waves of Bob-Ombs during the battle against Mario and Co. He also brings the quite literal example of Hoist by His Own Petard as Punchinello's 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.
  • Mario Kart: This is the main concept of the Bob-Omb Blast mode in Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The only item available for use is Bob-Ombs, so all characters throw them at each other during the whole round until only one remains (in the former) or time runs out (in the latter).
  • Mario Party 2: In the minigame Bob-omb Barrage, three players have to throw bombs at the fourth player, who is riding a wooden boat in a wide moat. If the team of three manages to sink the solo player's ship in under 30 seconds, then they'll win. But if time runs out, then the solo player wins.
  • Mario Party 7: In the minigame La Bomba, a player is performing Ground Pounds to open the crates that are being transported beneath them and unleash Bob-ombs onto the other three players, who are in the lower floor. The grey crates have only one Bob-omb, while the green ones have two and the red ones have four. The three rivals not only have to avoid the Bob-ombs' explosions but also the spiked cylinders placed close to them. If the solo player manages to get rid of the three rivals then they'll win; but if at least one rival survives after 30 seconds, then the trio wins.
  • Mario Party 8: The minigame Bob-ombs Away takes place within a Bob-omb factory and has three characters frequently toss Bob-ombs at the fourth character, who is in a lower ground. As the Bob-ombs fall, they're obstructed by bars reminiscent of those placed in pinball machines, so their falling trajectory isn't readily apparent. If the solo character manages to dodge all explosions during 30 characters, then they win. If not (namely, if they're caught by a Bob-omb's explosion), then the rival trio wins.
• In Spud's Adventure, Gerrit Carrot is directly called this in the manual and it's noted his bomb-throwing techniques scare enemies.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
    • Solid Snake doesn't have guns in this game due to Fantasy Gun Control, so he relies mostly on explosives. This also applies to his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
    • The enemy Bombed in Subspace Emissary. His head is a big cartoon bomb with a crazy smile on it, and to attack, he rips it off, throws it at the enemy, and runs off.
  • There are enough explosive items in the games to give every player the ability to be a Mad Bomber.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • A certain Black Scottish Cyclops who drinks while handling dangerous explosives. Note that this heavily depends on the playstyle - while spraying grenades around with reckless abandon certainly fits this trope, surgical planting of stickybombs in choke points leans more on the Demolitions Expert side.
  • Merasmus the magician has the Bombinomicon and will use it to throw ridiculous amounts of bombs all over the map while cackling insanely. The book, however, is even worse, and will give players bomb heads so they can blow the wizard up when he isn't bombing everything.
• More Cloud Cuckoo Lander than Ax-Crazy, but Kotohime from the PC-98 exclusive Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream is definitely touched in the head, and most of her spellcard-style attacks are actually bombs, so she otherwise qualifies.
• Trauma Center (Atlus): In the Forensics story in Trauma Team, one of the killers is this.
• 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.)
• In Verdict: Guilty!, Yohan specializes in explosives, acid vials, and terrorism.
• In Warcraft II, goblins were depicted as bomb-strapped anarchists who joined the Horde to spread chaos. Averted by future Warcraft games: As the world received a more fleshed-out backstory, goblins were retconned to a business-minded philosophy (although still employing suicide bombers among their more insane members). By World of Warcraft, they became a shady merchant race with only small nods to their previous depiction.
• As of the 3rd installment of Warriors Orochi, Dong Zhuo has become this, armed solely with an endless supply of pointy naval-mine-shaped bombs instead of a sword, club, or other similar weapon as a form of Divergent Character Evolution from his previous movesets, which were largely cloned from other warriors. It seems to have worked, as it also made him awesome to play.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies gives us Ted Tonate, a rather obsessed bomb disposal expert who spends his time marveling over the power and "beauty" of the explosives he handles. It's subverted to an extent since he's not actually responsible for the bombing that's central to the case he's in, but he's still an example of this trope. The actual culprit counts too, though his madness is of a different sort, and bombing seems to be just his preferred method for evidence disposal.
  Phoenix: "(Mad bomber, party for one.)"
• Yasu from Umineko: When They Cry, who's perfectly willing to blow up the entire island of Rokkenjima.

Web Animation

• Cherri Bomb from Hazbin Hotel has an endless supply of bombs, loves to blow things up, and participates in territorial wars.
• Tellyzx:
  • Beedrill and, to some extent, his girlfriend Durant from Stranded on Poké Island.
  • Vibrava from Andy X Challenge also applies to this.

Webcomics

• Carval from Heart Core fits this trope well along with his love for fire and explosive blood.
• Crazy Rhid the Gnoll in The Mansion of E.
• Lackadaisy: Rocky turns into this in stressful situations. In the animated pilot, he hijacks an excavator and stands on top hurling lit sticks of dynamite at the Savoys and Mordecai while delivering a poem in the most unhinged way he possibly could, interspersed with crazed laughter.
  Rocky: "The sudden circus comes to town!" (giggles insanely) [BOOM] "The behemoth and the top-hat clown! Come gather, come gather all around!" [bullets ricochet off the excavator bucket] "See them RAIN THEIR FIRE DOWN!" [BOOM] "AHAHAHAHA!!!"
• MS Paint Masterpieces has this interpretation of Crash Man, THE DESTROYER.
• Schlock Mercenary crew got Shore "Pi" ("he's as irrational as his namesake") Pibald — educated, very creative, complete nutjob — the sort of psycho who built an "ant farm" that actually consists of nanomachines making high explosives. For no better reason than "I try to blow up my lab. [The ship's AI] tries to stop me. So far he's winning."
• Sluggy Freelance: RIFF. So very much. Stuff Blowing Up is his philosophy.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Emil, who dropped out of academia to join a Demolitions Expert unit of the army working with high-grade explosives, describes the latter as "his true passion". His idea of packing for the expedition was filling a suitcase with explosives (that got confiscated the second he entered civilian quarters) and he has a large grin on his face when he sees the explosives that were assigned to the expedition.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has one of these — Gummer Groundpounder, gnome survivalist.
• Weregeek had a funny one — Abbie's Shadowrun character, Twitch.

Web Original

• Played for laughs with Demoman and Firecracker in Dino Attack RPG. The former is a drunk Scotsmen who tried to escape being killed by The Mole via a ridiculously large number of explosives ( subverted in that in his drunken state he wired them wrong. Firecracker, on the other hand, is an Ax-Crazy psycho who walks around with a trenchcoat filled with dynamite and will blow up anything regardless of consequences, even casually detonating the ridiculous amount of explosives set up by Demoman despite the fact that it could have leveled the building they were in.
• Smiffy from Hat Films is a variation in that he enjoys crafting nukes, causing Trott to freak out during editing since Smiffy probably plans to use it.
• John Mallory in Hitler Rants is this, using any explosive he thinks is necessary to blow up Hitler, ranging from dynamite and liquid nitroglycerin to liquid "Antic Explosives" to dynamite-filled trains, all the way up to nuclear bombs!
• Life SMP:
  • Grian is the cause of two of the three deadliest traps in the series thus far (his triple kill in 3rd Life and quad kill in Limited Life), both of which involve TNT minecarts and are followed by positively unhinged laughter. In particular, TNT traps are his forte while under Scar's employ in 3rd Life, to the point where he even rigs the entire desert to explode in the Battle of the Red Desert. He's killed four people (Scar with a creeper on Day 1 and Ren, Jimmy, and Skizz with a TNT minecart on Day 4) with explosions in that season alone.
  • In Last Life, after going down to his final life, Joel sets multiple explosive traps per day all over the map. Although the traps have only rarely succeeded, this cements Joel's reputation as a Wild Card in the series, especially combined with the fact he has the highest Kill Tally out of everyone in the season. Two seasons later in Limited Life, a vast majority of Joel's kills involve him dropping a TNT minecart on his victims, which is still saying something since everyone else was using TNT minecarts by the dozen that season.
• Ivy from Noob may be one of the protagonists and a relatively nice person, but she definitely has a thing for blowing up enemies with bombs that she makes herself.
• Mike Channell from Outside Xbox has developed this reputation — it tends to be exaggerated when there are jokes to be made, but there is a basis for those jokes.
  Mike: (during a Hitman let's-play) Oh, man. Explosive golf ball? Can you imagine a world where I don't pick up the explosive golf ball?
• Red Panda Adventures supervillain Kid Chaos is renowned for his use of explosives big and small. His every appearance features explosions and, in "Operation Cold Feet", the very first thing he does in the process of re-establishing himself in Toronto is to steal a cache of dynamite to get started with.
• When the guys from Shack Tactical play the ARMA mod known as The Game, if Dslyexci gets his hands on the remote control satchel bombs, you can count on him using them to devastating effect. This clip is a highlight of some of his bombings, and in full game footage, a successful bombing may be accompanied by gleeful (and perhaps slightly psychotic) giggling and laughter.
• Simon Lane has a particular love for TNT in the Yogscast playthrough of Minecraft, often causing problems for himself and Lewis Brindley. Other examples throughout include Creeper Boss who has blown himself up at least once and the evil Honeydew clones, who take after their father.
• TekkitLive: While all three members of Sun Whale have a tendency towards explosive methods of negotiation, Noah takes this to an extreme, notably having once built a "pile of bombs".
• Worm has Bakuda, a tinker who specializes in bombs, and is a complete psychopath, which makes for a rather terrifying combination.

Western Animation

• Slappy Squirrel of Animaniacs has a tendency to solve problems with explosives.
• Jinx from Arcane has had a fascination with bombs since she was a child. This later turned her into somewhat of a bomb expert/maniac.
• Batman: The Animated Series had one episode where an obsessed fan^note who looked exactly like, and was voiced by Bruce Timm 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.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Wrecker, the big guy, loves destruction and blowing things up. He angrily rejects Tech's notion that his love of destruction is caused by his genetic mutations.
  Tech: I am merely stating a scientific hypothesis based on factual data.
  Wrecker: Oh, well, I got a fact for you. I like to blow things up because I LIKE TO BLOW THINGS UP! Got it?
• 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.
  Mad Stan: BLOW IT ALL UP!
• Monkey Wrench, one of the Dreadnoks in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, specializes in explosive devices, and prefers loud explosions.
• The Inspector has a Mad Bomber called The Mad Bomber in the episode "Napoleon Blown-Apart." He broke out of prison and swore revenge on The Commissioner.
• Duff Killigan of Kim Possible is the golfing version of this.
• The villain of the Van Beuren Studios Little King cartoon "The Fatal Note", who tries, and fails, to assassinate the King with a Cartoon Bomb.
• Heroic? example with Rico in The Penguins of Madagascar.
  Rico: Kaboom kaboom kaboom?
  Skipper: Rico, enough with the dynamite already.
• 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?").
• One of these can be seen in Episode 30 of Schoolhouse Rock!, "Three Ring Government", dressed in a green robe, holding a lit stick of dynamite, and looking particularly burnt and shriveled. He is meant to represent one of society's many crimes to be balanced out by the Judicial Branch's courts.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Kletus Cassidy is depicted as one of these before he merges with the alien and becomes 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 is willing to blow himself up alongside Spider-Man and the police.
• 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.
• Total Drama:
  • Chris:
    • 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...
    • His love for the boom seems to have increased even more as of Revenge Of The Island. In the first episode alone, he blows up the boat the contestants arrive on, attaches them to totem poles, a boat full of meddling paparazzi, and Owen.
  • 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".
• 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.
• 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 fuses. 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.
• Cartoon Network's What A Cartoon! Show (which debuted Cow and Chicken and The Powerpuff Girls (1998)) 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.

Real Life

• Real-life example and Trope Namer: George Metesky, who planted 33 bombs (22 of which exploded) and injured a total of 15 people from 1940 to 1956. 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 xenophobic 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.
• Luke Helder put pipe bombs in mailboxes to draw a smiley face across the United States. Caught before he could finish, though.
• Mad Scientist and Eco-Terrorist Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. As a result of paranoid schizophrenia, he snapped and spearheaded an 18-year bombing campaign targeting academics and technologists (killing three and injuring dozens) before publishing his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, decrying industrialization and left-wing politics in order to prove Ludd Was Right.
• John Birges was the owner of a family landscaping business who lost his fortune to a gambling addiction. As revenge, he masterminded the Harvey's Resort Hotel bombing, creating what the FBI described as the most complex and defuse-proof bomb they have ever encountered. He was ultimately caught and sentenced for the bombing, but the engineering marvel born out of a mix of disproportionate pettiness and desperation is still used by the FBI in its bomb disposal training to this day.
• 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.
• Of MythBusters fame, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman.
  Jamie: When in doubt, C4.
• 1930s Terrorist Without a Cause Szilveszter Matuska, who finally admitted that blowing up trains just turned him on.
• Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini attempted to assassinate Napoleon III of France on 14 January 1858 at the moment when the emperor and his wife arrived at the Paris opera to attend a performance. Orsini's plan, which evidently paid no heed to "collateral damage", involved himself and three co-conspirators hurling bombs of Orsini's own design at the imperial coach. One of his cohorts was already sought by the police and was arrested before Napoleon's arrival, but the other three managed to throw their bombs. 12 persons (troopers of the escort and bystanders) were killed and another 156 were injured by the three blasts; Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie escaped unharmed because the walls of the coach were reinforced with steel plates.
• Danny Greene was an Irish mobster and founder of The Celtic Club criminal syndicate in Cleveland. The Celtic Club came to blows with the Licavoli crime family when Greene competed with them for control of the city during the '70s. In 1976 alone, 36 bombs exploded around the Cleveland area, which resulted in the place gaining the moniker "Bomb City, U.S.A". Greene himself was finally killed by a car bomb in 1977 but by that time, he had permanently crippled Licavoli's influence in the city.
• Before founding the Symbionese Liberation Army and kidnapping Patty Hearst, Donald DeFreeze was arrested for explosives many times.

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Statler: Did you see how Crazy Harry trashed the set?
Waldorf: Yes. Too bad he didn't trash the stage too.
Both: DOH-hohohohhoho!