Uber: The First Cycle

[arbre_rieur]

"It doesn't matter if Spider-Man's fighting Galactus — Spider-Man will find a way to beat Galactus. Uber isn't that story. Uber is the story that every single time, Galactus will kill Spider-Man." -- Kieron Gillen

Released on Free Comic Book Day this year, this one-shot is basically a summary of what's happened so far in UBER, a recap which Gillen provides in the form of a historian's research notes and writings for a book they're doing on World War II. He also works in a few hints about what's to come for the series.

Comments

"Red goop turns sensatives into living tanks."

[doodleboy]

Between this and "punch, punch" in the latest issue, Stephanie has a way with words.

[espanolbot]

I am curious as to how the series progresses now that both Hitler and Churchill are dead.

[tugrul]

Yess. As in, who will be pulling the strings of the German army now.

[captainbellman]

Erm...no spoilers , but you may want to retread that Gillen quotation at the top.

[icon_uk]

Galactus shows up?

[nomore]

This is a lovely guess. XD

[doodleboy]

Honestly considering the Panzermensch formula is in an alien language, and there have been for lack of a better term.... shenanigans happening, I wouldn't be insanely surprised. Some kind of other player seems to be pulling strings. For instance it says in other pages in this issue that Japan got the Uber formula under suspicious circumstances in which it should've been impossible for Germany to deliver it.

And hey there's a more obvious example, but that'd be spoiling.

[q99]

Leah really should be pretty overwhelming to the Battleships once she's complete, won't she?

They need not just a little, but a lot more potential in order to match up. Total potential of each battleship is unknown, but...

[korvar]

Soo... is there a Japan in this alternate world? A war in the Pacific at any point? There doesn't seem to be any mention of it...

[q99]

Yes, they were brought up in at least one issue. The main focus is on Germany, since they do a lot of the superhuman research, but Japan has their own supers and used them to wipe out a major island base at one point.

The allies are focusing more on the Reich, I think, because the Reich has Battleship-class ubers and Japan doesn't to my knowledge, just the standard variety.

[wizardru]

From what I remember of the posts, Japan got it's supers program from the Germans, who shared some of their knowledge in a limited capacity (clearly as a way to draw off some of the Allies strength). They then got kamizkaze ubers, whose main task is to do what the kamikaze plane strategy failed to do: send a single uber to self-destruct and take out an entire ship, thus crippling the fleet. The indication is that this is proving successful, so far.

[q99]

Yea, the halo effect's good at hulls.

It does make sense that it'd be fairly effective against ships, though they also use up their ubers fairly fast since, well, no coming back from that, and it normally takes a few to get one or two on.

[beardedjellybean]

Japan starts deploying ubers in Okinawa in #7, and the battle turns into a very bloody stalemate. The Americans now can't take the island without a HUGE amount of casualties, and while the Japanese have come back from the brink they still can't achieve overall victory either as there is simply not enough of them left.

[nomore]

Thank you for posting this.

I wasn't able to follow on Uber as much as I would have liked, so a synopsis definitely helps.

[althechi]

Not being facetious here, but what's stopping the Allies from nuking Germany back to the technological level of the Holy Roman Empire (alternatively, Odoacer's time)? Manhattan was producing plenty of nuclear weapons, and the Tube Alloys project would have supplied Britain with some.

[wizardru]

Possibly the fact that the weapon hasn't been tested yet and it's a much different thing to drop the bomb on an island nation thousands of miles away from your allies and one that directly borders them on an inland nation. Right now the US has the bomb and isn't ready to use it, YET. From the text there, I suspect that the implication is that when they try it, it doesn't work as expected. Do any ubers have flight capacity? Delivering the bomb may be far more dangerous in this setting.

[althechi]

Re: the first objection,

The Allies would have dropped the bomb on Germany in our reality, and were even prepared to use anthrax to poison their cattle supply for years, so that's not really much of a concern there.

Re: the second,

Yeah, you might be right there. If a Panzermensch could down the B-29 or Lancaster delivering the bomb, that would end very poorly...

[wizardru]

Well, I wasn't objecting, just supplying a possible answer. Operation Dark Harvest and Project Vegetarian were considered, sure: but we have no idea how seriously or how likely it would have been that they would have actually gone forward with them. It wasn't a fait accompli that the atomic bomb would be used, after all. The potential for backfire was pretty significant with Anthrax: the war was dire, but it would have to have gotten much, much worse before they enacted plans like those. Once Normandy happened, those plans were abandoned and hushed up. That they only were declassified some 50 years later is a pretty good indicator of how much they knew it was some pretty black stuff.

[yvonmukluk]

"It doesn't matter if Spider-Man's fighting Galactus — Spider-Man will find a way to beat Galactus. Uber isn't that story. Uber is the story that every single time, Galactus will kill Spider-Man."

But nobody wants to read the story where Galactus kills Spider-man.

Unless it's a What-If?, but that's pretty much par for the course.