Uber #26 - Avatar Press

UBER No. 26, June 2015

There is no doubt that series creator Kieron Gillen manages to build up a palpable sense of tension concerning the imminent deployment of “the experimental Battleship Churchill” during the opening few pages of Issue Twenty-Six of “Uber”. Joints aching, covered in an incredibly outlandish suit of plated armour, and destined to be simply dropped without a parachute over the warzone, it is inconceivable to think that many of this comic’s 5,536 readers weren’t utterly enthralled by the massively over-sized woman’s preparations prior to facing Sieglinde and Siegmund east of Calais, and to some extent at least, a little apprehensive as to Leah Cohen’s fate.

Sadly however what then follows is an incredibly demoralising experience which for many of this title’s long-term followers must have rivalled the despair felt with the bloody defeat of H.M.H. Colossus. For whilst the hulking female monstrosity momentarily provides “results [which] were everything Montgomery could have hoped for” and literally tears through her Nazi opposition as if they were made of tissue paper. “Montgomery’s Masterstroke” ultimately proves horrifyingly vulnerable to superior German battlefield strategy and is diabolically defeated by the combined might of supposedly no less than three battleship-class Ubermensch; “The conflict continued for the rest of the day. But in a real way, the battle was over.”

Obviously such a demoralising result during the course of Gillen’s fictional “alternate World War Two” has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the Stafford-born author’s penmanship. Indeed the exciting narration and pulse-pounding pacing of the fight between the two super-powered armies is terrifically well-written, especially when H.M.H. Dunkirk makes a bold, if not futile, attempt to “disrupt the halo-artillery” and plunges head-first into “the face of the larger body of German enhanced humans.” But such a depressingly dismal outcome to so bravely noble an attack by the “Jew(ish) girl”, and the horrifically gratuitous demise of Howard, is so deflating as to make it genuinely hard to read any further…

Just as successful as this “showcase” edition’s impactive script is Daniel Gete’s incredibly dynamic pencilling. Whether the subject be Leah remembering “The footage. Of the camps” and focussing herself upon the job at hand, or her standing toe-to-toe with her gas-masked blonde-haired opponent slugging it out, the Spaniard’s drawings are beautifully detailed yet wonderfully clean and full of energetic life.

The regular cover art of "UBER" No. 26 by Daniel Gete