Uber: Invasion #5 - Avatar Press

UBER: INVASION No. 5, March 2017

Focusing predominantly upon “the experimentation, production and R&D” of the Uber catalyst, rather than any specific battles between American and German super-soldiers, Kieron Gillen’s script for this twenty-two page periodical is no less impactive or grisly-looking than the series’ previous instalments. Indeed, as a result of Stephanie’s usage “of an unknown-sourced set of instructions for assembling enhanced beings” upon a couple of hapless volunteers and Joe Davies’ extreme reaction to his ‘activation’, Issue Five of “Uber: Invasion” contains some exceedingly disturbing sequences, such as the aforementioned soldier's bones literally snapping up out of his body, despite the scientist’s “increased precautions” to safeguard her ‘patient’.

This theme of ‘trial and error’, as well as the cost in human lives to succeed, permeates throughout the former music journalist’s narrative, and despite being understandably somewhat sedentary in nature, is made particularly evident when an arrogant General Groves realises that in order to develop “a tank-man army ready quick enough to win the second Battle of Kursk” Stalin quite ruthlessly “just threw half a million lives” away in the identification process. A sobering sum when one considers the American officer got “twitchy about the invasion of Japan” because of the amount of casualties such a task might cause and resultantly offers just three “catalyst-susceptible soldiers” to become the Allies “new superweapons”.

Perhaps somewhat fortunately though, the GLAAD Media Award-winner’s storyline does still occasionally step away from its increasingly depressing review of America’s war effort, and momentarily touch upon the title’s far wider plot threads. In fact, the horrifically bloody neutralisation of the Third Reich’s southern invasion force “in a skirmish west of Philadelphia” potentially demonstrates just how tenuous a hold the Axis Powers actually have in the United States, with Hitler’s hopes seemingly being solely reliant upon the abilities of his two battleship-class soldiers; at least until Barker’s cliff-hanger exclamation that a Japanese Uber has attacked San Diego…

Regular artist Daniel Gete undoubtedly adds to this comic’s overall gruesomeness by definitively depicting the brutal impact the ruby-red catalyst can have upon the human body. Yet, strangely appears ‘off-form’ when pencilling some of the wordier panels, such as when “a regular southern gentleman” spouts his prejudicial nonsense at the title’s leading “enhanced Negro soldiers”, or James Matthews is rather poorly illustrated simply eating with “the entire second wave of candidates.”

The regular cover art of "UBER: INVASION" No. 5 by Daniel Gete