Uber: Invasion #13 - Avatar Press

UBER: INVASION No. 13, April 2018

Despite containing the highly anticipated rematch between Battleship Sieglinde and "the unclassified class of enhanced human, Maria Andreevna", Kieron Gillen's script for Issue Thirteen of "Uber: Invasion" must have struck the majority of its audience as an exceedingly choppy affair which promises much with its fleeting features focusing upon Stephanie, Werner Frei, General George Patton, Leah Cohen, as well as the Battleship Yamato, and yet debatably delivers little. Indeed, it's hard not to feel that the former computer games journalist was always going to struggle to produce a cohesive story-line just as soon as he set his sights upon covering events which occurred across the United States, Siberia, Italy, Minsk and "Japanese-occupied China" all within the space of a single, piecemeal twenty-two page periodical.

Such a truly mammoth bout of word-heavy, internationally-based exposition would ordinarily prove difficult enough for any perusing bibliophile to stomach, especially when huge chunks of text are somewhat monotonously penned to replicate the dry tone of a text book. But disconcertingly, the British writer arguably makes matters all the worse by placing this comic's emphasis upon its conversational sequences, rather than its far more engaging action-packed battles.

This perturbing prioritisation genuinely seems to drag any of the book's pulse-pounding pace down into the "lake of... nutritious fluid" along with "the primary Soviet asset" following her shock defeat, and begs the question as to why Gillen felt Battleship Siegmund's interrogation session in which the one-armed traitor simply states "<Oh -- and I killed Hitler>" was worthy of four entire pages, whilst the German offensive against a "Soviet side" consisting "solely of Tankmen" is limited to just two tiny rectangular panels? Surely, some of this sheet space would have been better employed providing a better insight into the Battle of Minsk, or elaborate upon Maria's terrifying realisation that the grotesque-looking Battleship Zero "proved indifferent to the halo effect's distortion of its body"?

Fortunately, Daniel Gete at least provides some consistency to this publication, courtesy of his scintillating story-boarding. In fact, the "Avatar Press" artist's truly horrific detailed depiction of General Sankt's initial attempt "to create a battleship", along with Katyusha's wide-eyed belief that she has come face-to-face with Satan, is potentially worth the cover price of this comic alone... And such an accolade comes before even mentioning the illustrator's subsequent sense-shattering skirmish between the the pair of fearsome powerhouses, or H.M.H. Churchill's earlier angst-fuelled assault upon her bespectacled creator for failing to inform her "about Tamara and the bomb."

The regular cover art of "UBER: INVASION" No. 13 by Daniel Gete