Uber #11 - Avatar Press

UBER No. 11, April 2014

“Avatar Press” were entirely accurate with their pre-publication advertising for Issue Eleven of “Uber” as the narrative contained within this twenty-four page periodical certainly appears to be “a major turning point in the series” following the seemingly gruesome (off page) demise of Winston Churchill by the Battleship Sieglinde and subsequent shock death of the Fuhrer just a few pages later. Indeed doubtless many of the title’s 7,732 readers in April 2014 found it hard to imagine where Kieron Gillen was going to take his “unique and unyielding presentation of the horrors of [the Second World] war” next following “the startling deaths of two [such] principles players…”

Fortunately the Stafford-born comic book writer does populate this action-packed “incredible story” with plenty of clues as to what might be coming next, mainly as a result of the former music journalist introducing a variety of British super-soldiers into his fictional second London Blitz. Admittedly the “twenty Tank-Men [who] were in Central London, comprising a local Defence Corps and the Cabinet Bodyguards” have arguably been seen before at the Battle of Paris. But their almost casual destruction by the German female titan demonstrates just how inadequate and inferior the Allies’ current tactics against the Nazi enhanced humans still are. Something which is worryingly reinforced by the swift defeat of “The Heavy Tank-Men V1”; “an enormous physical improvement on previously existing Panzermensch” whose ablative armour would prove disappointingly deficient “to even momentarily weather the assault of a Battleship-Class distortion field”.

As a result it is clear that some radical rethinking of strategy will be necessary by the new leader of the United Kingdom if more decorations for valour, such as that earned by the heroic Corporal Brown, are not to be awarded posthumously. Whilst the tantalising glimpse of Bletchley Park protégé Leah, hideously huge and shrouded in cloak and shadows, suggests a mouth-wateringly brutal future confrontation between her and the invading Teutonic blonde bombshell Klaudia; “We need you near enough if it comes to that. We should be there in twenty minutes. Carry me.”

Arguably more surprising than Churchill’s savage bloody beheading beneath the War Rooms however, has to be the fall of Adolf Hitler at the hands of one of his very own creations. One moment the leader of the so-called Master Race is dining with “the disarmed Siegmund” and the next the ashen-faced lunatic is clutching his chest as the man posing as Werner manipulates his Fuhrer’s flesh and causes the Austrian-born dictator to expire from “a weak heart.”

The "War Crimes" variant cover art of "UBER" No. 11 by Gabriel Andrade