Power Up 1 Cover Reviews 

Pick of the Week: The Time Has Come to “Power Up!” [Review]

By | July 23rd, 2015
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Boom! Box continues to expand its line of diverse and entertaining comics with “Power Up,” about mystical guardians who aren’t entirely what you would typically expect. Colorful and adorable, the comic embraces all the genre conventions and gleefully goofs around with them.

Written by Kate Leth
Illustrated by Matt Cummings

It has been foretold that four noble warriors of incredible strength would be gifted with cosmic abilities at a moment of planetary alignment…which, yeah, something definitely went wrong here. Amie is a disaffected twentysomething with a lot of attitude, Kevin is a washed-up athlete way past his prime, Sandy’s a mother of two teenagers, and Silas…is a goldfish. Just a normal goldfish. Are we sure we read that prophecy right?

The closest way I can think to describe “Power Up” #1 by Kate Leth and Matt Cummings is as a cute and charming remix of a cute and charming 90s pop song. Taking its cues from super-powered team-up anime like Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura, “Power Up” takes all the conventions and story beats and genre tics and reapplies them to a group of people different from the usual Chosen One archetypes. I don’t think “Power Up” reappropriates or deconstructs or undermines conventions (or at least it hasn’t yet), or that that’s even its big ambition. Instead, the book finds its humor, freshness, and personality by goofing around with them.

The basic premise of the book is that these great powers from on high chose a group of four warriors to battle the forces of evil and champion the universe into a new age of peace, strength, and celebration. Except these powers from on high messed up on the math, and the four warriors turned out to be a construction worker, a mom, Amie, and a fish. (These characters are presented in their full regalia on the cover, though we don’t see any of them in the actual issue.)

Cummings and Leth focus the story on Amie, a 23-year-old girl who works at an underperforming pet shop. Following in the footsteps of characters like Bee from Bee and Puppycat and Scott Pilgrim, Amie isn’t anywhere close to having her life together. She’s frequently late, she forgets to clock out at the end of her shift, and she lets the milk turn bad. Yet, she’s still happy, with her pet hedgehog, cool hair, and hermit chic style. Actually, I appreciated that Leth and Cummings didn’t treat her with the more typical down-on-herself/sourpuss sense. For a book like “Power Up,” which is so willing to embrace the story beats of this kind of narrative, these small divergences help make it feel like its own thing.

Cummings’s art is more emotionally expressive than precise. His character designs resemble the badly-dubbed but still beloved Saturday morning anime cartoons, with pea-bodied heads, chins that are more beard than anything, and villainous dark tentacles of horror. Eyes are mostly oval slits, until something exciting happens and they open so big they’re in danger of popping. The designs are great, distinct and emotive. “Power Up” definitely wants to be a book that encompasses the wide range of people types that live in a city, and Cummings does strong work making sure that every single person who appears in this book has their own body type and style.

The expressive approach also helps carry the action sequences. I didn’t feel like Cummings offers much in terms of staging or movement, and instead relies on gestures, postures, and colors with the occasional dynamic pose in his delivery. But it works for the book, and it’s just as odd and colorful and goofy as everything else we’ve seen.

Leth provides some fun comedy and solid character work in her script. She also embraces the manga-style decompressed storytelling, where the issues teases us with a lot (the other characters, the villains, the mystic power stuff), but is more concerned with introducing Amie and her normal world. The panels are big and the dialogue is snappy so it’s fast-paced and lively.

But the thing is, those manga stories it’s aping are like four billion volumes worth of comics: they have the room to explore and meander. “Power Up,” at least right now, is only a six-issue miniseries. While I feel the tone and pacing and character work is appropriate for the type of story Leth and Cummings are telling, I fear that with a loose script and decompressed nature and limited amount of space, everything will be sort of shoved together at the end. For as much as this book obviously wants to accomplish, I feel the storytelling would have benefitted from being a little tighter.

“Power Up,” though, is still a fun and enjoyable book, and Kate Leth and Matt Cummings are having a ball creating this world and the characters. This comic is welcoming and embracing, if a little more narratively loose than it ought to be, and even if everything seems familiar, it bears enough of its own personality to make you want to see how it plays out.

Final Verdict 7.0 – the whole book is almost worth its price for the one shot where the fish turns into a whale that shoots lasers out of its eyes


Matthew Garcia

Matt hails from Colorado. He can be found on Twitter as @MattSG.

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