'Uber' explores monsters and men of World War II

• Kieron Gillen%27s %27Uber%27 mines the darker side of humanity
• The series imagines what would happen if Nazi Germany engineered an army of superhumans
• Real-life historical figures make appearances including Hitler and Churchill

Talking about his newest comic-book series Uber is both exciting and challenging for British writer Kieron Gillen.

But more than that, he's conflicted emotionally by the whole thing.

On the one hand, this enormous World War II horror story is one he's passionate enough about to write a 30,000-word bible about its characters, story beats and real-life historical situations.

However, it's also a bleak and often brutal "What happens if Nazi Germany got the bomb?" tale in some ways because it veers from reality by imagining Adolf Hitler and his SS developing superhumans in order to win the war and defeat the Allies.

"That is the horror of it — it's meant to be horrible. I entirely accept anyone's right to be offended by the story, but I'm very much not on Nazi Germany's side," Gillen says with a chuckle. "I feel completely redundant saying that but this is a critique of the problems of the psychology that leads to this and using the metaphor to explore those areas."

The writer, who teams with artist Caanan White, worries about the ethical questions of Uber — of if it's even possible to do an ethical book about seemingly unstoppable Nazi supervillains — but readers are so far embracing the tough subject matter: Both last month's zero issue and Uber No. 1, released last week from Avatar Press along with an "enhanced" edition of the zero issue, sold out at the comic-shop retailer level.

The series is a brutal and intriguing epic set mere hours before the end of the war in 1945, with the Soviet army surrounding Berlin and a broken and defeated Germany quickly crumbling.

Everything changes, though, with the introduction of the Ubers, comprised of two genetically engineered groups of men and women: the rank and file of the "Panzermensch" and the really powerful elite group known as "Battleships" who are living weapons of mass destruction.

It pretty much takes a bazooka shot at point-blank range to down a Panzermensch. So you can only guess from there how near-invincible Battleships Siegmund, Siegfried and Sieglinde are and what kind of damage they can do — they rack up a serious body count in the zero issue.

"Probaby the hardest thing about designing the Ubers is making them powerful enough to make a difference and not make them so powerful immediately they take over the world," Gillen says.

Their appearance sets off an arms race where other countries scramble to build their own superheroes to deal this new threat. (And Freya, an undercover agent for the Brits working undercover in a Nazi lab, is trying to high-tail out of Germany with their secrets in hand.)

Avatar editor in chief William Christensen had originally reached out to Gillen about doing a comic about Germany inventing superhumans. Then the writer extrapolated hugely on it "because I realized it locked into things I was thinking about — humans and society and responsibility and fear and death," he says.

"The thing about Uber is it's not a book about superhumans in any way, specifically not about the genre, and for me that was part of the point, as well."

The novelistic structure of Uber — Gillen hopes to get 30 to 60 issues out of it — explores the darker side of humanity, what power does to men and what kind of monsters there are in the world.

"It's a book that does not shy away from the question of monstrosity — it's very much a theme," Gillen says. "At what point does it become divorced from the intrinsic humanity? 'Superhuman' is just another way of saying not 'human.'

"In a real sense, a crisis shows humanity at its best and its worst, and there are moments in Uber that show why humans are worth continuing to exist."

A serious take on World War II superheroes is not new in comics, according to Gillen — it has been done in books such as Zenith, Tom Strong and Garth Ennis' The Boys. And even the idea of Nazi supervillains is a common trope now, though they're usually rendered as zombies and the like for "safe" fiction.

Gillen, however, really wanted to use the metaphor of enhanced humans to expand upon World War II themes in a respectful way.

"As a writer, I might tend to be more interested in why people do bad things than why people do good things. It's why people are led down horrific moral paths and all the different reasons for that," Gillen says.

Uber also wildly differs from the main superhero books he does, including Iron Man and Young Avengers for Marvel Comics.

In fact, one of the core ideas of the book was to stray from the traditional idea of heroic action fiction that the hero will always rise to overcome an objective.

"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," Gillen explains. "In the same way that a tank is an incredible piece of hardware, a modern attack helicopter will always take out a tank just because they are different tools for different purposes.

"It's not a story about heroism and overcoming. This is the story about just being [screwed]. Occasionally, the economics and the military situation will lead to people being crushed in the wheels of history, and that's true whether you are the most powerful person on Earth or if you're just a random orphan living in the streets of Okinawa. These are enormous forces that can crush anybody."

Even though it's called Uber, the book focuses on more than the Nazi war machine. The series will span the globe in terms of different theaters of war and in types of characters — however, there are no leads since Gillen wants readers to worry that people could die at any time, sometimes rather nastily.

"Caanan and I are not just interested in doing the brutality thing. When we show brutality, it's horrible," the writer says. "It's not just someone unleashing a bomb — this is knowing who is in the building when the bomb is unleashed."

There will be point-of-view characters and supporting players like Freya and the lethal Soviet sniper Maria, and a whole history book of real-life figures like Hitler, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and, from the research-and-development side of things, Alan Turing and others at England's Bletchley Park code-breaking center.

While some are harder than others — Churchill is "brilliant to write," Gillen admits, but "any day where you write Hitler isn't a fun day. That's not something I like doing" — Gillen feels a sense of responsibility to be fair with all his interpretations, just like with any historical fiction.

"I'm writing Hitler literally at the end of the war," he says. "Anyone who's seen for example Downfall knows Hitler isn't exactly in the rightest of minds at this point. That's the kind of Hitler I'm writing — he is a man who is physically broken.

"There are moments when I'm writing something and I realize it's not fair to do that to that character — rarely with the Nazis. I was writing Georgy Zhukov the Soviet general and I realized, 'No, I think that's unfair to Zhukov,' so I had to completely reapproach the scene."

Gillen spent a lot of time doing research over the past five years, poring over history books to reach an acceptable amount of authenticity and mapping out Uber's battle plan. He sees the series going from Germany to Britain to Okinawa to the Eastern front and the Soviet superhuman program to the Atlantic Ocean.

He stayed home for the first five-issue arc and focused on primarily the Western theater and aspects such as Churchill's politics and Bletchley Park. It all builds to the first big battle between Allies and Ubers.

"There is very much a Battle of Britain-ness to it, the refusal to give up and fighting uphill," Gillen says. "Having Nazi Germany have the lead in this field creates an enormous challenge for the Allies to try to match. That's the thing with the first arc: Can we get superhumans together in time for this thing that is happening?

"World War II in Britain is a strange thing and it hangs over us, and this is very much me processing a lot of that," adds the writer, who is also delving into history with Three. His Image Comics series with artist Ryan Kelly debuts in October inverts the Thermopylae myth with a trio of Helot slaves on the run from the Spartan army of 300.

Uber is unlike most everything he's written and it's the anti-superhero comic in many ways, but the series is "not solely a grim-fest," Gillen promises.

"I find these people incredibly heroic, especially the people who are completely innocent. The question of innocence is interesting in Uber (with) people being crushed by something much larger than them and the horror people face with real dignity. There's heroism in that as much as in anything."