Uber: Invasion #2 - Avatar Press

UBER: INVASION No. 2, December 2016

It’s pretty clear from both the seriously solemn pacing and harrowingly grisly subject matter that the script for Issue Two of “Uber: Invasion” “really coalesced” for Kieron Gillen whilst he was walking around the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. Indeed, considering that the twenty-two page periodical’s plot focuses almost entirely upon the horrific trauma caused to the population of Boston by the invading German’s aerial halo effect, one could so easily believe that the British writer was actually penning a contemporary piece about the uranium gun-type weapon’s destruction of “the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu.” 

Similarly grim and melancholy are the survivor’s stories this comic captures as the author’s well-dressed narrator carefully picks his way through the levelled city’s desolate remains, occasionally pointing out the odd blackened corpse of interest. Horribly marred, their flesh melted to the very bone in places, these ‘eye witness’ accounts are terrifyingly haunting in their authenticity and prove especially disconcerting when the tale’s owners expire as the camera is rolling; “Something about the proximity of the halo effect disrupts brain chemistry.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is little glamour to be had with Gillen’s narrative even when the American’s super-soldiers do arrive, with Eamonn "Razor" O'Conner still clearly suffering from “the old Okinawa combat stress” and haunted by ‘what happened to his brother in Paris’. In fact, this instalment’s sole consolation is that General Groves clearly has a plan to eliminate Siegmund in the same way the Russian’s took the Battleship-class Uber’s arm at Kursk, and, perhaps more importantly, enough “superhuman bodies” with which to enact it.

Terrifically detailed and worryingly adept at pencilling the disfiguring flow of melted flesh over the human body, Daniel Gete’s breakdowns are a disconcerting treat and really do a fine job of imbuing even the most gruesomely impaired inhabitants of Boston’s remnants with pitiable life. Admittedly, many of the artist’s drawings are confined to celluloid-shaped panels in order to help generate a feeling that the reader is watching an old reel of film. But few will surely forget the star-spangled soldier Ray as he nonchalantly describes the Germans moving “across the North Bank of the Charles” as his disembowelled guts bleed out…

The regular cover art of "UBER: INVASION" No. 2 by Daniel Gete