As much as I love comics that exercise restraint and subtlety, sometimes it’s nice to read one that absolutely does not. Daniel Warren Johnson’s Do a Powerbomb!, published in 2023 by Image Comics, discards restraint and says “fuck off, subtlety!” It is bombastic, brightly colored, and ludicrous — which is fitting. After all, it tells a story about pro wrestling.
Do a Powerbomb! focuses on a wrestling family that is torn apart by tragedy. In the opening pages, Lona, the comic’s protagonist, witnesses her mother die in a horrific accident during a match, a moment of childhood trauma that forever alters the course of her life. The story makes clear that Lona idolizes her mother’s wrestling career, and she decides to shoulder her legacy, even adopting her mother’s stage name, Steelrose. As intense as it sounds, this emotional bombshell of an introduction is the most low-key part of the entire book. The actual plot only starts when a necromancer from another world who is obsessed with pro wrestling — yes, you read that right — manifests in front of Lona to offer her a deal: He’s organizing a tournament and, if she wins, he’ll resurrect her mother. And there’s a twist. In this tournament, the wrestling is stripped of kayfabe. The storylines aren’t prewritten; the violence is real.
Like I said: Bombastic and ludicrous. But still compelling.
The book succeeds largely because of its visual style, which fits with the insanity of the premise. Johnson is incredibly good at getting figures moving on the page. The story is, at heart, a manga-inspired tournament arc, and its characters are rarely at rest. I’ve read a lot of bad action comics; I know it’s very easy for a cartoonist to just lose track of where characters are or fail to convey some key moment to the readers. But Johnson knows how to keep the narrative momentum of a fight going from panel to panel — and, more importantly, when to bring the forward motion to a sudden halt for maximum dramatic effect. Just look at how he executes this drawing of Lona’s aerial technique:
I love this page because of the way Johnson exploits and works against the natural directionality of comics. Normally, as readers, we’d expect the action of a panel to move in the same direction as our eyes. This is what happens in the first two panels, when Lona jumps and knees her opponent in the face. But this expectation is reversed when she performs her moonsault: Notice the way she seems to jump backwards, moving against the flow of the page and bringing the action to a jarring standstill. It’s a genuinely fantastic moment, emphasized by the dynamism of her landing in the very next panel.
Where Do a Powerbomb! falls apart, unfortunately, is in its character writing. Johnson is telling a story about family and relationships; Lona’s entire motivation for fighting is, first, to honor her mother and then, when she’s roped into fighting in a supernatural tournament, to save her mother. But the narrative suffers immensely from the presence of Lona’s father and how his character is handled. Lona’s father is — unbeknownst to her — also a pro wrestler. And not only is her father a wrestler — he is also the very wrestler who accidentally killed her mother, aka his wife. When this twist was revealed, I almost threw my book on the ground and did a senton bomb off my desk to obliterate it.
I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for a good wacky story. A necromancer being an avid fan of pro wrestling and organizing his own tournament? Sure, absolutely, no problem. But a daughter being so oblivious to and incurious about her father’s life that she never realizes or suspects, at any point, that he’s the guy? A girl who never once researches the identity of the wrestler who killed her mother? I couldn’t do it.
It’s a shame because I could imagine a version of this comic that actually works so much better. If Johnson didn’t feel the need to make the father’s identity a twist, there could have been a genuinely moving story about Lona learning to forgive him. I’ve neglected to mention this, but the necromancer’s tournament is a tag team event; Lona and her father are recruited as a pair, and Lona only discovers his true identity in the middle of a crucial match. An alternate telling might have focused on Lona’s unwillingness to work with her father; her need to overcome her resentment to have a chance of saving her mother; and a narrative arc that revolved around the two learning to fight together. But given the comic’s frenzied, nonstop pace, there is no time or breathing room for their relationship to actually develop or mean much of anything. (Lona’s discovery of his identity happens well-past the halfway point.)
When I said this comic was bombastic and ludicrous, I meant that as both praise and disparagement. Do a Powerbomb! is an overpowering and fantastic visual experience — and tells a story that strained my credulity in exactly the wrong way.