Uber: Invasion #14 - Avatar Press

UBER: INVASION No. 14, June 2018

Starting with one of artist Daniel Gete’s most sickeningly ghastly images imaginable, as Battleship Zero triumphantly sits atop a devastated Russian Tank tearing its driver’s head from his blood-drenched corpse with the super-powered beast’s malformed jaws, Kieron Gillen’s script for Issue Fourteen of “Uber: Invasion” must have struck its audience as being designed to both race through the title’s numerous plot-threads as fast as possible, whilst simultaneously trying to imbue his work with as many of the horrors of this “alternate World War II” as well. Indeed, such is the sheer pace of the former computer games journalist’s narrative, that in many ways it makes the twenty-two page periodical feel as if it is deliberately tying-up loose ends before the ongoing series’ final instalment, especially when it starts chopping from events depicted in Minsk, Vladivostok, Siberia, the Kremlin, Smolensk and Italy all within the space of just over half the book.

Fortunately however, the Kerrang! Award-winner does at least momentarily pause to deliver an insight into the Third Reich’s tactics designed to thwart an Allied Zephyr Flight, and resultantly provides a welcome spotlight upon Sieglinde as she battles a formidably-sized contingent of T-34 tanks and becomes “aware of a lesion on her cheek shortly after 14:00”. Trained to follow a specifically-designed manoeuvre which leads to “a single-enhanced Blitzmensch destroyer… unleashing a broad low-intensity halo effect across the area” she inhabits, the blonde battleship's drill proves remarkably effective in instantly vaporising the ‘Flash-like’ American soldiers, and due to a haplessly brave attempt by one Yank to outwit the Nazi force’s Anti-Zephyr system, undoubtedly proves to be the comic’s highlight; “These low-level halo effects were insufficient to damage a Tank-man level enhanced human. However, a bubble of energy would still cause the death of a zephyr if it collided with one.”

Just as tense, albeit without any trace of blood or bodily mutilation, is Stephanie’s confrontation with H.M.H. Churchill. Leah’s intense anger at the secret agent’s cold-hearted willingness to previously tie Tamara to a bomb rather than risk the young girl falling into the hands of the Axis Powers has proved a genuine barrier to the pair’s subsequent relationship, and never has that divide been more evident than in this publication when General Patton demands to put the wheel-bound woman in front of a firing squad of siege guns when she refuses to “be redeployed via Turkish corridor” alone. Having explained the rationale behind the decision to split the debilitated behemoth from her child protégé, the British scientist tells the giant woman to “crush my head if you don’t trust me with her”, and then holds her breath as every anxious reader looks into the chillingly dead eyes of Cohen’s eyes and nervously turns the page…

The regular cover art of "UBER: INVASION" No. 14 by Daniel Gete