Comic creator Jim Starlin is taking his displeasure with current President Donald Trump to a new level, modeling a villain after him in his newest comic series. Details of the character and his likeness come by way of The Hollywood Reporter, who revealed that the evil “Plunddo Tram” (an anagram of Donald Trump) will appear in Starlin’s “Dreadstar Returns.” This upcoming graphic novel, funded through Kickstarter and raising over $135k, will be released later this year and marks the first time that Starlin returns to the world of Dreadstar in three decades. In an interview with the trade, Starlin opened up about his feelings for Trump and how that morphed into including him in the comic.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“Like most everybody else, at the beginning I was giving [Trump] the benefit of the doubt, hoping he would grow into the job, and he hasn’t,” Starlin told THR. After the president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was clearly less than ideal, that’s when Starlin went back and put him in Dreadstar Returns.
“I actually went back to rewrite the script around those pages, because king Plunddo Tram wasn’t quite as despicable as I wanted him to be,” Starlin said. “I went back and got worse with it.”
(Donald Trump cover photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
The series will also apparently feature an image of “King Plunddo Tram’s head on a pike,” a call back to the controversial photoshoot done by comedian Kathy Griffin back in 2017 featuring a decapitated head of Trump.
This isn’t the first time that Starlin’s comic work and President Trump have crossed paths, as the President’ re-election campaign posted a bizarre video in which the sitting president was depicted as Thanos from Avengers: Endgame. Thanos (a Starlin creation) was the prime antagonist for Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.
“After my initial feeling of being violated, seeing that pompous fool using my creation to stroke his infantile ego, it finally struck me that the leader of my country and the free world actually enjoys comparing himself to a mass murderer,” Starlin told ComicBook.com at the time. “How sick is that? These are sad and strange times we are going through. Fortunately all things, even national nightmares, eventually come to an end.”
Starlin’s creation marks the latest comic book villain to be modeled after Trump as 2016’s Spider-Gwen Annual #1 featured a new take on the classic villain MODOK with M.O.D.A.A.K., the Mental Organism Designed As America’s King, featuring Trump’s likeness for its giant face.
