Uber #9 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (writer), Caanan White (pencils), Joseph Silver (inks), Michael Dipascale (colors) and Kurt Hathaway (letters)

The Story: The Soviets turn the tide on the Eastern front.

The Review (with SPOILERS): This was another very solid issue for the series.  As with the whole series (and I’ve said this before), it remains much more of a war-comic rather than an alt-superhero comic.  I feel like I need to keep pointing that out because we’ve gotten so many World War II comics featuring superheroes (like Captain America or the Invaders or Hellboy or whoever) and then there are the “clever” comics/characters (like Red Son, Red Skull, etc.) that attempt to show us how the bad guys also wanted superheroes and how the post-War could have been very different.  Uber is decidedly not THAT.  It is not focused on characters, but on the narrative of the War itself.  We do get to know a little about the humans who are turned into super-soldiers, but it’s pretty shallow.  These guys aren’t Captain America where Cap’s origin as a humble, skinny kid are vital to understanding his entire world-view.  These are just disposable human soldiers who are deployed impersonally because war sucks.

Another thing that I loved about this issue is that it shows the series is (probably) going to be pretty faithful to the factual outcome of World War II.  I doubt it’ll be a series where we’ll examine, “What if the Nazis won?”  This issue focuses on the Eastern front of the European Theatre.  Aside from little snippets about the Battle of Stalingrad, the Eastern front doesn’t really enter our Anglo-centric consciousness.  That’s probably because the Allies had their hands full on the Western front, but also because the Soviets were the bad guys and we didn’t really care about what happened to them.  If the Soviets wanted to feed hundreds of thousands of citizens into the Nazi wood-chipper, that was great because it meant that many fewer American and British boys would die.

Uber #6 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (writer), Caanan White (pencils), Keith Williams (inks) and Michael Dipascale (colors)

The Story: The story of superbeings in World War II shifts to the Pacific Theatre.

The Review (with SPOILERS): Uber continues to do thing differently enough to be interesting and unique.  The first five issues had followed World War II in the European theatre as the Germans were just about beaten…..before unleashing their superpowered beings on the Allies.  The Allies responded and we ended that story with the Battle of Paris in the last issue.

Now we shift the focus to the Pacific Theater.  The Japanese are on the ropes (this is around the time of the Battle of Okinawa) and surprise……the Japanese seem to have a few superbeings too.  What I really liked about this revelation is that it isn’t made precisely clear HOW the Japanese ended up with these beings.  Did the Germans tell them how to do it?  Given how completely beaten the Germans were in the first story-arc, it seems a little implausible that they would have time to share.  It also seems unrealistic that they would WANT the Japanese to have the same technology.  So, perhaps it is a case of independent creation?  In reality, all of the major WWII powers had their own nuclear programs, so it would appear that in the Uber universe, they all had superman programs (and all of the spying on enemies and allies that comes with such programs).  Neat!  I look forward to seeing if the Japanese supermen have the same limitations/powers as the German/British/American supermen and superwomen.