Looks can be deceiving, it's an obvious cliche but in the case of Drive, I initially thought this was a goofy cartoony space comedy from the creator of Sheldon. I gradually realized this was a rich and fertile world. What could look like a motley collection of goofy aliens becomes a decent storyline with a clear internal logic. Human history has been transformed by the application of an alien technology and the chaos surrounding the main character is an incursion into this narrative.
The pilot finds himself beset by various foolish games and various fuckeries and it's a rollicking ADHD sort of strip with a low key non-edgy humor mixed in with some realpolitik. There are intersections between the past and the present story-lines scattered throughout the strip, not enough to take your from the main storyline but enough to gradually immerse the reader in a tragic story behind the comedy set in place.
The idea of an English / Spanish language mixture for the future is certainly different, the continual implementation of fact sheets from the 'enciclopedia Xenobiologia' within the comic gives the reader a good background briefing of a 'space opera' styled world.
At first I thought the title of the strip was reductive but as I continued to read the strip I saw that the 'drive', or the ship's engine becomes an underlying emphasis of human civilization and its subsequent war with the 'makers'. The way this underlying tragedy is portrayed can be a middle ground, the artwork is cartoony but bold, the creator of Sheldon clearly has the experience to pull this off and the imaginative prowess to get stuck into creating a large universe with a plethora of diverse lifeforms. It doesn't look serious but there's a pitch here for an underlying mythos that is worth the time of any science fiction fan. Robert Heinlein it ain't but it's clearly a webcomic with some teeth.
I guess if you're looking for analogies then the 'zaniness' of 'the Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy' might be a good reference point. Sometimes the humour doesn't quite hit it, a little too 'zany' for my tastes and the visuals are a little too fluidl and cartoony to absorb sometimes, for all that's it's a strip making an attempt to create an intelligent space opera.
The appeal of this strip is its resolute attempt to tell a story and while the safe 'dad' jokes wear thin occasionally I kept with this strip primarily because of the underlying vision behind it.