As established in the first issues of Kieron Gillen and Canaan White’s Avatar Press book Über, this isn’t just another comic series using the World War II aesthetic to stylize it in a popular way – this is a sequential art project about World War II itself, via speculative fiction based on the notion that the Nazis developed “wunderwaffen” – aka superhuman soldiers – in time to stave off their defeat at the hands of the Allies. In Über #2, we see more ramifications of this development – the Berlin air strike is nearly entirely vaporized by a pair of “Battleship” class super-soldiers, while the lesser but still super “Panzermensch” troops chase down Dr. Freya Bergen, who is actually an undercover OSS operative who sold her soul in the line of duty and is now trying to escape German clutches.
There is no unity even in the German response to the use of the wunderwaffen – after witnessing Hitler use a Battleship to murder an entire camp full of helpless P.O.W.s, a General Guderian is now muttering treasonous thoughts about the Reich being fucked now that the war crimes have been laid bare, and there’s a General Sankt muttering that certain unfortunate developments are not as disastrous as “electing an Austrian peasant.” The war is still wearing on the soldiers on all sides of the conflict, and the wunderwaffen are only exacerbating it. Even two of the three Battleships themselves are debating the morality of the third, Hitler’s aforementioned monster.
Of a particularly compelling nature is Dr. Bergen’s end run to try and get the superhuman technology into the hands of the Allies, while also desperately attempting to relocate the scruples she had to abandon in order to keep her cover intact during the experimentation phase. Muttering aloud that her “ends justify the means” attitude might prompt her to murder some starving innocents who are impeding her, and once she finally finds some friendly troops, she begs them to call her Stephanie, her real name before the job, while at the same time using them as bait to set herself up for the killshot on her Panzermensch persuer. This woman is broken, and one imagines she might fall apart completely once she delivers her information to her superiors.
Gillen’s story remains heavy, and this installment is particularly tense, and he also continues to seemingly apologize for writing any of this in the afterword, reaffirming his desire to find a way to tell a World War II story ethically. White’s art remains dark and unflinching – not perfect, but he certainly goes for broke at crucial moments, like showing us the way to kill Panzermensches is putting a bullet in their eyes. Über continues to impress, while giving the reader an ugly, unsettled feeling in our guts, reminding us that despite all the hay made from it in fiction everywhere, war remains hell.
