X-Men: 10 Characters That Must Appear In The New Mutants Movie

Tabitha ‘Boom-Boom’ Smith forms glowing capsules of psionic energy that detonate with impressive destructive force, ‘bombs’ that she’s capable of manipulating in size and power, even muffling the sound or delaying the blast as though on a timer. She’s been called a lot of things over the years, some of them even repeatable: like Time Bomb, Firecrackers or Meltdown when she was going through a serious phase.

But ‘serious’ and Boom-Boom don’t hang out together very often. To those that don’t know her, she appears to be a rather shallow, immature creature: however, it’s a public persona at odds with her sad upbringing as a juvenile delinquent, beaten by her father in working class Roanoke until she ran away, living on the streets and surviving through theft until she was taken in by the original X-Factor, former X-Men who introduced her to the New Mutants.

Warren Ellis famously characterised her as literally brainless, a ditzy kleptomaniac that liked to blow stuff up. That worked fine for his gloriously callow NextWave series, but not for nothing did Marvel retcon those characters as having had their personalities altered by their shadowy former employers.

Tabitha ‘Boom-Boom’ Smith is an abused kid, a teenage runaway and a total misfit masquerading as cynical, airheaded mall-jumping white trash: a girl who - in all her many, many team affiliations - is really still just looking for a home, somewhere to belong. The New Mutants (and later, X-Force) was the first and best home she found.