By David Futrelle
So I was browsing through the #QAnon hashtag on Twitter, as one does, and admiring the amazing graphic design abilities of the Q Believers and MAGAheads in general, when I ran across a couple of memes that made me wonder if I was hallucinating.
After further investigation of the meme artist responsible for them I have concluded that, well, I’m not the one who’s hallucinating. I would try to explain further, but nothing I could write would quite capture the, er, unique vision of this sui generis genius. And so, without further ado, let me present you with some selections from the ever-growing oeuvre of the man they call BD-13 67, a.k.a. @BowsOverBoston, a.k.a. Bobby Dembow.
Here’s the meme that first caught my eye and caused me to wonder if my brain was working properly.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1051564738738556928
But this is merely the tip of one fucking trippy iceberg.
As the meme above suggests, BD seems to have a bit of an obsession with Ivanka Trump, though his tributes to what he sees as her fierce beauty are undermined somewhat by his inability to understand how human necks work.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1048254946943160320
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1048196155715276802
BD also seems to think Melania is hot stuff as well.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1051533446739316742
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1048196487430230017
BD has devoted much of his energy in recent weeks to promoting the hashtag #RedOctober, a reference to a typically vague QAnon promise that something big and terrible is coming this month that will utterly ruin the Democrats before the midterms.
For someone purportedly on the side of “light” and “truth,” BD has a penchant for exceedingly dark and violent imagery; many of his #RedOctober memes look a bit like rejected posters for extremely low-budget horror films. It doesn’t help that he makes frequent use of the stylized skull logo that has come to be associated with Q.
Weirdly, most of these memes are filled with admonitions to vote, though presumably BD is aware that the midterms take place in November, not October.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047664645874622464
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047649071895400448
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046937485975195648
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047143244054900742
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047280585016786945
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046777490566524929
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046772184188899330
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046510652444028929
The ones featuring the slogan “Make it Happen” — sometimes rendered in rather hackneyed horror movie fonts — strike me as the most ominous.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046927080791973889
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046894144055062530
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046887826082684929
At this point it’s basically obligatory to make a reference to the Mitchell and Webb “Are we the baddies” sketch. (If you’ve already watched that one too many times, here’s a completely unrelated bit from Mr. Show that’s pretty funny. I mean, there’s really no reason for me to post it here but, hey, it’s been a pretty shitty week.)
My favorite of BD’s “are we the baddies” memes has to be this one, with the phrase “TRUST YOUR FELLOW MAN” incongruously appearing underneath a glowing, skull-faced Trump standing on what I can only assume is supposed to be a beach on the Bikini atoll shortly after the bomb tests that rendered it uninhabitable.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046977655319539712
Some of the memes refer vaguely to the alleged “evil” that Trump and his followers are allegedly battling, but in many of them it’s not clear what exactly this evil is supposed to be. Here “evil” seems to be a child … walking on a railing?
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047249063392038912
This one seems to suggest that Trump and his eagle buddy here are themselves the evil to be vanquished.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046966822073970690
As for this one, your guess is as good as mine:
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047611956927057920
“Vote them all out” is a rather unusual message for someone supporting the party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress to push. And indeed, more than a few of BD’s memes might at first glance appear to be anti-Trump, anti-GOP memes dreamed up by some graphic-design-deficient #Resistance fighter on a meth binge.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047276975826632704
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047170857506885634
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046932082444984320
What has BD got against astronauts, anyway?
But BD’s memes don’t just reference horror and apocalyptic science fiction. Some of the #RedOctober memes have a distinctly western feel, having been, er, “inspired” by promo art for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, which, much like QAnon’s assorted predictions, has been plagued by confusion and delays. (It’s supposedly shipping later this month. We’ll see. But unlike QAnon’s predictions, it’s pretty clear that it will materialize in the real world at some point.)
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047670851875819521
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047667740423737344
Then again, BD may not be able to tell west from east — as evidenced by this enigmatic meme featuring the Great Wall of China as a sort of stand-in for Trump’s as-yet-unbuilt wall on our country’s southern border.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1047525982930984960
But of all BD’s puzzling memes, I find this one perhaps the most puzzling.
https://twitter.com/BowsOverBoston/status/1046479514350628864
Why an escalator? Because Trump famously rode down one on the day he announced his candidacy to a crowd of “supporters” who were mostly paid actors? In light of the revelations about Trump’s paid supporters at that event, why would any Trump fan want to remind anyone of it in a meme?
I can’t answer those questions. But there IS one question about BD-13 67 that I can answer definitively: Does he happen to have a Soundcloud where he posts exceedingly bland but basically competent self-produced instrumental tracks in a sort of Reggaeton style?
The answer is yes. Yes, he does.
I may return to BD and his memes in a later post, examining his pre-#RedOctober work. But right now, after many hours staring at these weird and baffling memes, I think I need a break and I suspect you all do too.
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Having been born and raised in Boston and environs, I really hope he has no actual connection to the place.
And I have to think Putin is laughing his ass off over the “Red October” bit. I mean, why not just come out and say “Trump is going to lead us to our glorious Communist paradise!”? Though this idiot seems too clueless and ignorant to even know what Red October means. Sort of like “Get a Brain Morans” or “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
I can’t believe these guys win anything.
The Melania “helmet of salvation” one, yeesh. Has this guy never heard of the term “White man’s burden?”
“We are ready to fight for a better world” sounds pretty fascist to me in this context. A little too close to the “14 words” some of the Neonazi crowd are fond of.
Well, there’s clearly no reason for this dude to have a website. you’ve posted pretty much his entire portfolio right here.
free advertising.
yeah yeah, I know “shine a light”
but did you really need to make it an entire studio’s worth of lights?
I’m sure he has, and he probably takes it very, very seriously. I’m also 110% certain that he actually believes that intense, genocidal, fascistic racism, the kind in which everyone who isn’t white is either killed or enslaved in the name of Jesus, is the answer to everything.
As for the rest of it, well…let’s just say that the satire writes itself. There is literally nothing you could make to mock these people that they haven’t already made for themselves. Probably under the influence of some serious bath salts.
Cthulhu, take the wheel.
Also, this seems appropriate for all this.
Ooh, scary. Red October looks super scary.
Not nearly as scary as the economic, social, political, and environmental destruction that Trump and the Republican Party are visiting upon planet Earth. But still super scary.
BD-13 67,
The Punisher called. He wants his skull design returned to him yesterday, or else he’s gonna stop by for a…chat with you.
And that includes the skull with the flag design as well.
https://countryboycustomsstore.com/product/printed-decal-0003-american-flag-punisher-skull-with-spartan-helmet/
?fit=428%2C456&ssl=1
ETA: If I get a choice for October theme months, I’ll take Inktober over this Red October junk any day.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.creativebloq.com/amp/inspiration/7-tips-for-completing-inktober-2017
Okay.
A. The one with the astronaut looks like he’s pissing on the skull, a la those peeing Calvin decals that Bill Watterson hates, so that’s, uh, hilarious.
B. What the everliving fuck is up with those font choices? Even just using easily-available free fonts, it would take very little effort to be much edgier than this mommyblog bs (no hate to mommyblogs but why is this guy ripping their style?)
I have no desire to click on it to find out, so just to know, does anyone else at all use that RedOctober hastag, or is this just him trying to make it a thing?
As for the “This evil must be destroyed” one with the kid on the railing, well, that kid is clearly wearing a MAGA hat, so our pal may not be completely wrong.
@ Rabid Rabbit
I clicked. And he’s not the only one – though weeding out their RedOctober from the big party happening in Soho on the 26th is tricky (The party has better graphics)
He went down the rabbit hole just to see how far it goes… Now his head is stuck and the rabbits are angry.
Two things:
(1) I suspect the peeing astronaut image is indeed a visual reference to those “Calvin peeing on something the decal maker wants to mock” car decals that probably give poor Bill Watterson acid reflux, used to make some sort of defiant statement about the presumed insufficient patriotism in the new movie “First Man”. The Right has been bellyaching about how that movie won’t show the US Flag planted on the Moon because liberal traitors hating America or something. (According to the movie makers, that’s not even correct – apparently the movie doesn’t show that actual moment of planting the flag, but the flag – very much planted on the Moon – does apparently indeed appear in several shots. I dunno, I haven’t seen it.)
So I am reading this along the lines of “Here’s an image of the US Flag on the moon, take that, libs! Triggered?! Mwah hah hah, I pee on you!” Which makes it more comprehensible to me than the vast majority of this guy’s imagery.
(2) The “Dead Men Walking” graphic includes, among others, John McCain. I would have thought the he, at the very least, would be a dead man not walking very much at all these days. Unless our auteur is also trying to imply that Trump is some sort of powerful necromancer in addition to everything. (Axctually, given the rest of his oevre, it’s not entirely out of the question that he does in fact believe that about Trump.)
So with the second Ivanka one, Ivanka is an evil bobblehead who is being destroyed by her bobbly head falling off her overly long and narrow neck, right? At least that’s the message that the terrible visual gives across.
Since one of Q-anon’s accusations is that the other side is a giant pedophile ring, maybe the kid on the railing is supposed to be one of the child victims they claim to be defending?
Can we share more Mr. Show sketches?
@Redsilkphoenix
I kinda wish somebody would pay mister BD-13 67 a visit. One he wouldn’t necessarily be walking away from. 😛
7th meme down – “There is nothing more precious than our children.”. This galls me. As long as they’re white, American-born children, right? And to hell with the others.
“Take the Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit” sounds like something out of Mystery Men. “We struck down evil with the sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.”
I’m in awe of the ineptness of these memes. They’re so vague about what the “evil” is and why it “must be destroyed”. He’s lazily trying to provoke horror and fear, but also cram in as much right wing iconography as possible, which has the effect of making Trump and eagles and astronauts look like the evil that needs to be defeated. I mean:
“There is nothing more precious than our children”
(Trump brandishing a chainsaw)
“This evil must be destroyed”
Now there’s a winning message. “Voters! Your love for your children is evil and must be amputated”
AAAH I’m severely allergic to terrible graphic design, can someone please grab my injector pen from my bag?
Ugh, that’s horrible. And also hilariously Russian: is that intentional?
Could the escalator refer to the escalation of this meme “war”? Or am I thinking about this too hard?
The fourth one down seems to be saying that a manga version of Ivanka will behead her father for the common good. Which is unlikely, though I can see the appeal.
The escalator one, first thoughts were, “Why is an orange Pepe the frog having a crap on Trump’s escalator?”
And then… well, what could be more apt?
Trump is the neo-nazi-repurposed cartoon figure’s steaming dump on a moving staircase.
@Neurite perhaps he believes that McCain isn’t actually dead, but is secretly being held in a “dark site” someplace so he can be tried with the rest of the supposed traitors when Red October happens. I’m sure someone out there in QAnonland thinks McCain’s death was faked.
I thought “the sky is falling” is from the story chicken little. It paints trump as either the stupid chicken or the wolf that ate everyone.
This is a big signal boost for someone who seems to be largely ignored by the QAnon crowd. I took a look at the twitter feed, and all the like and retweet counts are pathetic. I think drawing attention to this individual is a misstep.
Nope
The thing that the igno-right is most proud of is their lack of, and their intense hatred for, LEARNING