“Power Drive”
Creative Staff:
Story: Ivan Cohen
Art: Pop Mhan
Colors: Rex Lokus
Letterer: Travis Lanham
What They Say:
When a super-in-sync gang of criminals bring their high-speed crime spree to Washington, D.C., it’s up to Wonder Woman and guest-star Wonder Girl to bring the bad guys down! But how will they catch the criminals, who vanish without a trace after every heist?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
It’s been a couple of months since we had a new installment in this series and I’ve definitely missed my time with Wonder Woman. The one-off stories have been fun and seeing the range of characters she can work with proving to be pretty enjoyable. Here, Ivan Cohen steps in to work on the story here and it covers a lot of ground that definitely works well so it feels like you get multiple layers to it and not just something flimsy. That said, there’s not a lot of down time here so most things happen quickly and on the move and that’s ideal for Pop Mhan. While Mhan can certainly handle non-action scenes in a great way, here they’re able to run with the numerous ones that we get as Cassie is paired up with her in order to drive things forward.
Here, Cassie has called in Diana to Washington, D.C. to help with a robbery that involves some shiny cars running dangerously down the street. It’s a good piece as we see Cassie doing her best to deal with things but having a hard time being in multiple places at once, which is why Diana’s showing up is timely to stop a baby from getting killed. What’s revealed, however, is that the cars have no drivers and what was stolen is worth far less than a single one of the four cars. That puts a lot of concern into what’s going on and it gets even more so when we see the footage of the theft itself where the masked people almost engage in that with a kind of whimsical joy. Again, things are done with such ease that makes no sense especially since the initial item, a watch, isn’t worth much.
With ARGUS doing some investigation themselves with Steve Trevor dealing with that, we get some nice time with Cassie and Diana hanging out together for dinner. And Cassie has convinced Diana to go to a k-pop concert with her the following night as well. That, of course, is going to tie into the thefts going on as one involving motorcycles comes into play and the dates of the concert itself seem to match up to things. It’s the kind of story that has to play things bluntly in order to move forward because it has only so many pages but it’s just a lot of fun to watch these two together and to figure out that the k-pop band is involved in things and that absolutely nothing is as it seems. There may be clunky parts here in order to achieve things but it delivers it all in a very fun and fast way with Cassie and Diana clicking as good as they usually do.
In Summary:
Having a kid of my own that’s heavy into k-pop, I’ll always cringe a bit when I see it come up in comics and elsewhere for a variety of reasons. Cohen handles it well enough here and I’ll just laugh for the shirt that Diana wore to the concert itself and how it was used to advance the storyline in a great way. The story, in general, is constantly moving but the downtime we get is pretty nice and I like what we get from our two leads. It’s less about the villain here and more about them so it works well for me in that regard. Mhan’s artwork is solid as it always is and I like his take on just about all of the characters here and how well the flow of the action was handled. It’s good clean fun through and through.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology and Kindle
Release Date: October 21st, 2020
MSRP: $0.99
