Wrestling is a weird storytelling medium. Most people who watch go from ardent believers of the violence happening in the ring—to the point where many a sibling’s broken bone can be attributed to a swanton bomb off the top bunk—to realizing the artifice when seeing a man having to wrestle his boss in tag team match where his partner is God. But one thing that unites them all is the spectacle—the lights, the tights, the violence, and the feats of strength. With Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer, and Rus Wooton’s Do A Powerbomb, we have all of that spectacle and more. 

Yua Steelrose is one of the best to ever enter the ring. As the holder of the Tokyo Grand World Heavyweight Title, she has to defend herself against longtime partner and rival, Cobrasun, in one of the biggest matches of her career and one in front of her daughter, Lona. But when a slip from the top rope causes Cobrasun to drop Yua on her neck, Lona is left without her mother and without direction. A decade later, barely able to scrape by in the ring, Lona is approached by Willard Necroton, a necromancer and lover of professional wrestling. He proposes she enter his tournament with tag-teams from across the universe with the grand prize being the revival of any person of her choosing from the dead. But there’s two catches: Necroton doesn’t know that wrestling on Earth is fake and that her tag partner is Cobrasun. 

Do A Powerbomb does what we all want to see in most wrestling: lean into its ridiculous absurdity. In a sport where one of the most iconic figures burned down his family mortuary and is powered by a mysterious urn, there’s fertile ground for the strange. Johnson, Spicer, and Wooton also know that with the absurd, you need that balance of humanity. Even if we want to see giant guys slapping each other, we want a story that we can connect with. At the heart of every tag team that we see, we get what they’re fighting for—lost loved ones, defenders of their kingdoms—and see that desperation in the ring. Even if their opponents have to die, most of these tag teams will do whatever it takes to get back what they had lost. 

Taking bumps to bring back the dead doesn’t seem that far off for a normal wrestling story line, but in Do A Powerbomb we dig so much deeper than we ever could in the ring on its own. While we feel the impact of every suplex, every slap, and every barbed wire-covered baseball bat, what we feel most of all is Lona and every struggle she has to get to the top of this tournament to bring her mom back. It’s why we keep coming back to stories of muscles and high-spots, we want every kind of impact they can give us. 

Get excited. Get tagging.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.