Uber: Invasion #4

[laughing_tree]

'When I started writing Uber in 2008, that was coming from a “people are now now treating Nazis like cartoons, which bodes badly for the future, because if we don't remember what the Nazis were and why people supported them, it's more likely they'll be back” place. By now, that's a less hypothetical projection.' -- Kieron Gillen

Comments

[q99]

Not show: Stephanie blowing up the Nazi sub they tricked into giving them a ride.

[jlbarnett]

the page quote kind of interests me. Mel Brooks always said his goal was to turn the Nazis into jokes, because basically who wants to be part of or support jokes.

Which POV do you think is better?

[bizarrohulk]

I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive. Unless I'm misunderstanding Gillen's intent, he's not talking about mocking the Nazis (which is always a good thing IMO) but rather about reducing them to the status of comic-book villains like Hydra or COBRA, which carries the risk of minimising the very real evils that they were responsible for, and causing people - especially young people - to forget that they're still a very real threat in the world. Mockery, if done correctly, keeps the memory of their evil alive while also removing their mystique and reducing their ability to attract converts, while treating them like cartoons, as Gillen puts it, risks making them seem harmless and even normalises them to an extent, making them part of our popular culture instead of a warning from history.

[arilou_skiff]

The thing is, from my POV that's exactly what Gillen is doing: With the entire magical superpowers thing he neatly avoids having to deal with how things actually happened, and they're just cartoonish supervillains.

[doodleboy]

The way the magical super-powers are treated are like a new piece of technology though. And past that it's clear that it's trying to be written not as a fantasy but as an alternate history. With research being done to try to get the rest of the period details right (whether it succeeds or not).

One of the ways this series was pitched is that this is a story of "What if Germany got the atomic bomb first".

And despite the super-powers the series is evoking real history. The destruction of Boston is reminiscent of the destruction of Hiroshima. The brutality of Siegmund's invasion of Russia reminiscent of just how brutal Germany's invasion of Russia was. The cold and inhumane calculations that Stephanie and the American generals made were similar to the calculations the people in power during World War II had to make.

And Invasion is an exploration of how America would react if it felt the same stakes and bodycount Britain, Russia and France did during World War II as both stated by Kieron and put into text by Stephanie. Uber is not exactly being subtle.

So yes, what's happening to America in the series is fictional and exaggerated. But it's there to explore what happened in World War II when the Nazi's had a massive war-machine and looked like they could've won. When USA created a weapon that could and still can end all life on earth.

To me that's a valid use of genre, even something like the superhero genre. Presenting a heightened version of reality to make us ask questions we wouldn't have asked otherwise.

[wizardru]

Motto.

I may not always like how this is being presented, but I think that Gillen is achieving the goal he set out to; this very much feels like an alternate history with SF elements. The Nazis are not being presented as Arnim Zola-esque cartoonish villains with a TV in their stomach (although it's worth noting that character was created by a man who fought actual Nazis in WWII), but instead as very human monsters.

If anything, this is more akin to Wild Cards, before that series started getting off the rails due to the usual issues the introduction of super powers often introduces.