Uber #15 - Avatar Press

UBER No. 15, June 2014

There’s certainly plenty of pulse-pounding “alternate World War Two” action to enjoy with Issue Fifteen of “Uber”. For as creator Kieron Gillen himself notes in the comic’s afterword, this edition finally reveals “what actually happened when Sieglinde tried to leave London” after “three months of dancing around” the German superhuman soldier’s fate and as a result depicts a genuinely awe-inspiring naval battle off the beach at Southend-on-Sea between the “Home Fleet” and the Kriegsmarine.

Indeed the British author’s narrative must have proved an absolute delight to its 7,456 upon its publication in July 2014, as from the very first page all attention is focussed upon the fast-fatiguing assassin of Winston Churchill and her desperate bid to reach the seaside resort’s iconic pier. Rifle-toting Tommy Atkins, the Home Guard and two cruisers, a battleship and an “amount of destroyers” are all wantonly thrown at the flagging blonde-haired powerhouse in a desperate bid to establish whether “the greater destructive potential of a ship’s canons might be able” to “affect a battleship-class enhanced human”… And for a brief moment it actually appears as if both the stout late Prime Minister and the long-dead HMH Colossus will finally be avenged.

Ingeniously however, any such wishful thinking is soon ‘put to bed’ by the former music journalist’s “big… introduction of the Blitzmensch”; a somewhat gangly feral-looking armoured German soldier whose enhanced Halo effect is twice those of an ordinary Panzermensch. These ‘bullet-headed’ warriors, positioned at the prow of a handful of gunboats, easily slice through the hulls of the ships harassing Klaudia and frustratingly allow the battered and bruised Ubermensch to safely evacuate the English estuary on board a U-boat, whilst also “causing enormous material losses to the Home Fleet.”

Equally as exciting as the “fragile” S-boats’ “successful raid” is the artwork of Daniel Gete, who finally “joins us in the main book” having illustrated “the Siegmund short story” in the title's March 2014 special annual. Described by Gillen as someone whose “clear-lined thoroughness gives Uber a completely different feel to Caanan’s energy and rage or Gabriel’s classic realist elegance”, the “Logan’s Run” penciller really does an outstanding job of depicting the sheer ferocity and power of the sea battle, and even manages to give a cheeky nod to the fictional “Dad’s Army” of Walmington-on-Sea courtesy of a cameo by Captain Mainwaring.

The variant cover art of "UBER" No. 15 by Daniel Gete