Uber: Invasion #8 - Avatar Press

UBER: INVASION No. 8, August 2017

Reintroducing “the second of the three pillars of volume one of Uber”, the Battleship-class Ubermensch Katyusha, Kieron Gillen’s script for Issue Eight of “Uber: Invasion” was probably viewed as something of ‘slow-burner’ by the comic’s 4,053-strong audience in September 2017. In fact, to be brutally honest, it isn’t until the “poor little living atheist god Maria” shockingly blows off Comrade Olesya’s right hand a good third of the way through the twenty-two page periodical that things finally start to get interesting. 

Up until this horrifyingly swift moment of mutilation however, the Stafford-born writer seemingly spends far too much time focusing upon Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov’s dialogue-heavy attempt to convince ‘his fellow worker’ to either invade Germany (and bring an end to the war) or reveal the secret behind her ability to manifest a shipment of catalyst from thin air, than is necessarily needed. Admittedly, these dialogues disclose just how treacherously untrustworthy the Soviet politician and his blonde spy’s motivations towards their “mystic hero queen of the Motherland” are, but in many ways this hostility can clearly be seen in the way the duo confidentially conspire with one another when they first meet at the Siberian gulag’s gates; “Olesya, tell me -- Has she taught you her secrets yet?”   

Far less obvious, until the comic’s end at least, is Andreevna’s motivation for gratuitously ‘disarming’ her “strapping” student’ and then sending the maimed young woman fleeing into the cold winter night wearing just a bloodied bed shirt. Momentarily, it actually appears that the surprisingly naïve "Manic Sniper" has actually deduced that Molotov has hidden a murderous mole within her training ranks and is going to gruesomely torture her enemy to death. However, such a vengeful motivation is quickly dispelled when Maria momentarily appears in the wilderness a good few days later, in order to help feed a dishevelled, sickly Olesya and reveals that she is in fact, trying to teach her student how to make the all-important bright red catalyst for herself.

Strangely, artist Daniel Gete also seems to somehow struggle with the plodding pace of Gillen’s storyline for this edition, as he disconcertingly appears to be unable to pencil “Blondie” with any consistency once she has escaped the gulag and spent a few nights buried beneath the Siberian snow with only a halo’s heat to keep her warm. Likewise, the illustrator’s renderings of Olesya’s three forerunners, with perhaps the exception of the macabre remains of the third, don’t appear quite as well-drawn as some of his similarly-themed previous work for this title.

The regular cover art of "UBER: INVASION" No. 8 by Daniel Gete