Comic Book / Über

Beware the superwoman.

Über is an ongoing comic book series published by Avatar Press and written by Kieron Gillen, with art by Canaan White, Daniel Gete and Gabriel Andrade. Its first issue appeared in 2013. Like many Avatar Press books, it explores extremely dark themes of bloodshed, depravity, and dehumanization using sci-fi and fantasy elements. The series took a break for much of 2016 after 27 issues, before a partially crowd-funded second volume launched at the end of the year, with the new overall title of Über: Invasion. That series ran for an additional 19 issues (of an intended 21) before stopping again. Though the plan is to publish 60 issues total, it has been on hiatus since October 2018.

Written as a deconstruction of the concept of Stupid Jetpack Hitler and of classic superhero tropes, the story begins just before the end of World War II in Europe. Days before the Third Reich's defeat, with the forces of Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front and Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front storming Berlin, a breakthrough is made—the Nazis successfully create superhuman soldiers. With super-strength, bulletproof skin and matter-disrupting energy beams, the "Übermenschen" save Hitler's regime from certain collapse, fundamentally changing the nature of warfare in the process. Unable to defeat the Übers through conventional means, the Allies are forced to develop superhumans of their own. Things rapidly go downhill for the Nazis and Allies alike.

If you're looking for a typical feel-good superhero story where plucky good guys can win against vastly stronger foes... look elsewhere. Über has no clear protagonists, an atmosphere of extreme moral ambiguity, and a profusion of blood and gore. Aside from its science-fiction elements, it's a brutally realistic war story which, in its creator's words, "is not meant to be enjoyed".

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This comic contains examples of:

• Achilles' Heel:
  • While incredibly strong, the heavy Übers have a fatal weakness. Other heavies can kick out their kneecaps with ease, effectively crippling them.
  • All Übers in general appear have a finite "power supply" that fuels their abilities. Prolonged exertion without rest will deplete their powers. Further exertion past their limits causes the disruption halo to backfire and kill the Über.
  • Geltmenschen's ability is psychic, so they can only fake the appearance and voice of another - not their physiology. Stephanie recognizes one masquerading as a Tank Man by the fact he sweated during sex. They also can't fool cameras.
  • Zephyrs can't receive physical or halo activation, so more powerful Ubers can force them to keep their distance or even kill them by taking the incredibly counterintuitive measure of blowing themselves up: they can survive that, but Zephyrs can't.
• Achilles in His Tent: Katyusha refuses on moral principle to help the Red Army in any offensive beyond the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact border of divided Poland, which is one of the many things that doesn't endear her to Stalin.
• Alien Space Bats: The Nazis develop super-people. Even more so, they did it via Imported Alien Phlebotinum – a chemical catalyst known as "Woden's Blood", and a mysterious book in an unknown language which contains instructions on how to create Übers.
• Alternate-History Nazi Victory: The comic is a vicious take on the scenario and Stupid Jetpack Hitler with the point of divergence arriving at the very end of World War II through the introduction of super soldiers on the Nazi side. The war gets extended, millions more end up dead, and results in an arms race between the different powers all trying to develop their own "Ubers". The Nazis' explicit plan is not to win, but to "make everyone else lose as well". The book ends up deconstructing this as although the Nazis reconquer Europe and defeat the British Empire, the land invasion of the USA that marks the high point of their success degenerates into simply a series of horrific massacres committed For the Evulz, and things then go rapidly downhill for them once their initial advantage as the first country to have superhumans dissipates. The biggest historical divergence in the book is that the Soviet Union collapses forty years early, and that was nothing to do with the Nazis at all, but instead due to Joseph Stalin getting his hands on the most powerful single superhuman in the world through dumb luck, but then being unable to stop trying to screw her over out of ego and paranoia.
• America Saves the Day: Averted. Though the US manages to hold its ground, it's increasingly less "America winning the war" and more "America losing the least." Then Goebbels decides that since it has more long-term economic potential than the USSR, and a more fragile political order, they should attempt to raid it into societal collapse. (Independently?) The Japanese Army sends its sole Battleship to raid the USA's Pacific Coast.
• Anti-Hero: Stephanie takes part in brutal experiments as part of being undercover in the German Über program. And to successfully escape and deliver information vital for the Allies to have a chance in the war, she uses an Allied tank crew as bait for an Über.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Siegmund is a type one, being decidedly disgusted by the carnage he sees and partakes in and utterly despises Siegfried for his cruelty, brutality, and fanaticism. He also attempts to console and guide Sieglinde as best he can, and overall appears as an honest soldier trying to defend his country. However, he is still a Nazi soldier fighting for a regime that he knows to be pretty much pure evil or so it seems... In fact, his plan from the start was to gain an audience with Hitler and secretly kill him for his tactical incompetence which caused so many of Siegmund's friends to die on the Ukrainian Front.
  • Sieglinde is a type two, being obsessed with revenge for the death of her disabled husband in the Dresden Bombings and everyone else who died in said bombings. To this end she seeks revenge on Britain (and Churchill) in particular, which is granted when she is sent on a suicide mission to attack London and kill Churchill. She has an enormous kill-count from her battles in Berlin, Paris and London, but objects to the mass slaughter of prisoners by Siegfried; unlike him, she takes no pleasure in her work.
• Anyone Can Die: There is no main protagonist because of this trope. Anybody who looks as if they might be developing into an audience-identification figure will almost certainly die horribly very quickly. Even Churchill and Hitler are killed off by the end of the first plot arc.
• An Arm and a Leg: It's very frequent.
  • Colossus got his arms torn off by Sieglinde during their battle.
  • Siegmund loses an arm after being ambushed and briefly overpowered by 90 Soviet Tankmen.
  • Leah nearly loses her leg during the Battle of Calais.
  • Razor loses an arm and has his back scarred trying to save Siegmund from a nuclear bomb.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Conventional tank armor is no match for the physical strength and disruption halos of the Übers. However, the British outfit their heavy Übers with ablative armor that can temporarily protect them from the disruption halos of German tank-class Übers. Their ablative armor still proves totally useless against Sieglinde.
  • Leah Cohen's expensive state-of-the-art armor is largely redundant, as Leah is impervious to anything less than a nuclear bomb. Its only purpose is to defend against the halo attacks of Battleship-class Ubers, and is demonstrated to be quite effective at the Battle of Calais.
• Art Evolution: Gabriel Andrade's issues have a notably different art style to Canaan White's, especially in his depictions of the characters. Markus/Siegfried in particular looks much more androgynous in Andrade's artwork.
• Asshole Victim: The sociopathic, sadistic and fanatical Markus/Siegfried is the first Nazi Battleship to die in the comic, by a deservedly Cruel and Unusual Death with his throat being slit, half his skull being blown up and massive blood loss finally doing him in. Siegmund was torn about whether to save him or not, but wasn't particularly upset at being ordered to retreat.
• Artistic License – History: The Germans killed 3.3 of the 4 million Soviet POW they captured during the war, yet the comic treats the massacre of another million (captured during the Berlin Uber Counter-Offensive) as uniquely heinous. This is likely because a) it escapes mention in most Cold-War accounts of the war (which focus on German and Western Allied suffering to avoid engendering sympathy for Communists) and b) only Polish and Soviet POW were killed deliberately through neglect and accidentally through overwork, so many English-language historians fall into the trap of assuming that they were treated just like French and Anglo-American POW.
• Ate His Gun:
  • Hitler was about to in the first issue.
  • Subverted when Churchill considers it after Colossus is killed and the Germans take Paris, but knows he has to live and serve his country.
  • In Über Special #1, General Walther Wenck (who survived the war in real life) does this when he realizes that the Übers' intervention will prolong the war.
  • In Invasion #11, Field Marshal Guderian in charge of the German invasion force in the USA does this after Siegmund surrenders.
• Back from the Brink: The emergence of the Übers allows the Axis powers to stave off total defeat. The Allies are in turn saved from disaster (at least temporarily) by creating their own Übers.
• Back from the Dead: Adolf Hitler seemingly comes back almost immediately after being pronounced dead. However, he is being impersonated by a shapeshifting Geltmensch and later Josef Goebbels after plastic surgery.
• Badass Abnormal: Some Ubers were already incredibly capable before gaining powers, such as sniper Katyusha and General Patton.
• Badass Army: The Nazi "panzermensch" brigades, the Japanese "Miyoko" and, later, the British "His Majesty's Humans". The Soviets apparently call their Übers "shock workers".
• Badass Crew: The African American Zephyrs, who accomplish what hundreds of Ubers have died attempting: killing a Nazi battleship, though sadly at the cost of their own lives.
• Badass Longcoat: The German Battleships get fancy tailored uniforms. The Soviets give Katyusha a badass coat.
• The Bait: Razor acts as this to lure Siegfried into an ambush by the Zephyrs. Then, later, he baits Siegmund into A-bomb range. This doesn't work out as well as the first ambush.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Leah Cohen can survive indefinitely without oxygen.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Subverted with Sieglinde after her confrontation with Maria and with Leah whose activation turns her into a deformed and hideous giant.
• Berserk Button: Threaten a peasant couple in front of Katyusha. Go on, I dare you.
• Beware the Superman: The setting in general. And (possibly) Katyusha in particular. She finally goes through it after being betrayed by the Soviets and pays them back in full by destroying them completely.
• Bizarrchitecture:
  • At one point, Sieglinde uses her matter-warping abilities to create a twisted, alien-looking "bridge" over the Rhine so her soldiers can cross.
  • At the battle of Kiev, Katyusha Maria creates strategic high ground for herself by transmuting the air itself into a massive pillar of solid steel. This is later referred to as the first known piece of Halo art.
  • During her final Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Maria flattens much of the Kremlin - except Stalin’s office, held aloft by an impossibly thin staircase she creates. It’s the first time we’ve seen an Uber build something that appears to defy gravity.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The Nazis are obviously, well... Nazis (and Hitler gets to be even more sadistic now that he has superhumans on his side). But the British spy who made the UK the second nation to get Übers took part in mass vivisection to help get the information. Allied leaders such as Stalin are willing to commit atrocities of their own to build more Übers, and Soviet soldiers are depicted raping and killing German civilians. On the personal level, the individual Übers on all sides range from honorable patriots, such as Colossus and Siegmund, to sympathetic revenge driven individuals such as Klaudia/Sieglinde and Leah Cohen, to outright psychopaths, such as Markus.
• Black Comedy: Leah Cohen accidentally crushing a barn full of cows with a thrown tank, while Stephanie can only apologize sheepishly to the farmer.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • The Übers can survive injuries that would be instantly fatal to unenhanced humans. This is taken to a horrific extreme with Colossus, who has his entire upper body partially melted, his rib cage ripped open, and his whole head split down the middle and stretched apart. His lungs and heart are very clearly destroyed. And he's STILL ALIVE, until the Allies find a way of euthanizing him with an industrial drill. ...and Siegmund, melted by a close range atomic explosion in a brutal callback to Colossus’ fate. No euthanization for Siegmund.
  • Less horrific, but still unpleasant, are the other side-effects of the Übers' superhuman physiology. They can only have sex with other enhanced humans (after a certain level of strength activation), they have to eat the same sickly nutrient paste for every meal, anaesthetic doesn't work on them, and in some cases exhaustion can cause their disruption halos to fatally overload.
  • Leah Cohen gains strength and speed greater than any other Über after being enhanced into a "heavy battleship". Unfortunately, this has the side effect of turning her into a misshapen, hunchbacked giantess, and a transformation slower and more painful than others.
• Body Horror:
  • When Sieglinde gets the advantage on Colossus, she turns him into something that looks like a frozen, swastika-shaped explosion of gore. He remains alive in this state for hours until the Allies figure out how to euthanize him.
  • Leah Cohen's Heavy Battleship activation turns her into a misshapen, over-muscled hunchback who is briefly immobilized under her own weight.
  • Battleship Zero, the Nazi's failed prototype, is a barely-humanoid, melted mass of flesh.
  • Siegmund ends up melted but alive from a close-range nuclear explosion.
• Boring, but Practical: Some of Sieglinde's most effective acts in the war has been acting as a combined artillery force and engineering corps: building bridges to transport armies and raising towers for vantage points to fire halo effects.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Hitler repeatedly insults and belittles Siegmund, a nine-foot-tall nigh-invincible superhuman who can kill him with a glance. He even shrieks at him in fury when he quietly points out someone has come to give him an important message. Siegmund does not put up with this, eventually killing him.
  • After finding the escaped Maria, the first thing a Soviet officer does is threaten her with only two non-Über soldiers as backup. She escaped in the first place by obliterating a Soviet gulag, and is already known to be an Über by the authorities, if believed to be a defective one.
  • Duncan repeatedly disparages Leah Cohen's appearance within earshot, and shows absolutely no concern for her comfort or well-being. Just to be clear, Leah Cohen is the fastest, strongest, and most durable living thing on Earth, and if she so chose, she could wade through a nuclear explosion to pop Duncan's head like a pimple.
  • While General Patton became an Uber himself in this continuity, he bosses Leah around despite her being Battleship-class—a disabled one, mind you, but still his superior in physical strength. He thinks that ever since her kneecapping, she became useless and she proves him wrong by flicking him and blowing him across the room. Had he been a normal human, he would have splattered all over the place.
• Came Back Strong: Played with. Katyusha takes a small sample of Woden's Blood, and appears to die, with blood spurting from her orifices. She later wakes up in a mass grave. Some time later, she develops various strange new abilities...
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: After Anita Scheele floats the idea to Sieglinde that she might choose to defect like Siegmund, which would doom Germany's war effort because of her One-Man Army status, Scheele is arrested for treason. Albert Speer points out that the Fuhrer wanted her executed, but he argued to keep Scheele alive since her unique skill of using her halo as a sculpting tool is irreplaceable for the time being. However, to keep the secret that "Hitler" is actually Goebbels (who had his face altered by Scheele) from coming out, he orders her tongue and hands to be removed.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Alan Turing goes to bed early. That's because he's resting from the effects of the activation process.
  • The sabotaged nuclear bomb the Americans dropped on Tokyo. The Japanese use it as their last-ditch weapon.
• Child Soldiers: Realistically portrayed; early on, teenage Hitler Youth/Volkssturm members are shown hiding from the advancing Soviets in Berlin. The American soldier and potential Battleship Über Razor is said to be too young to drink (18-21 years). There's also Britain's second Battleship, Tamara. She's a pre-teen, but her activation speeds up her physical aging, making her look like a young adult when it's done. Even Nazi Battleship Siegfried is revealed to have been just a 14-year-old teenager by the time of his death.
• Code Name: Given to particularly powerful Ubers for propaganda purposes and as signs of respect.
  • The three German V1 Battleships are Sieglinde, Siegmund and Siegfried (Hitler's idea because of his enthusiasm for Wagner; a lampshade is hung on the confusing similarity of the names).
  • From His Majesty's Humans: Patrick O'Connor was HMH Colossus, Leah Cohen is HMH Churchill, and Howard is HMH Dunkirk.
  • From the US Enhanced Human Army: Patrick's brother Eamonn is USS Colossus II, Vernon Rivers is USS Bluestone, and Freddy Rivers is USS Bravo.
  • Japan's first Battleship Miyoko takes the name of Yamato.
• Continuity Snarl: The reveal that Markus is 14 does have some timeline issues. It's established that he killed a Jew as a child, which puts the year he did it in the early-to-mid-40s. What kind of blatantly Jewish man can walk the streets of Germany unharassed during those years?!
• Coitus Uninterruptus: Klaudia's communications officer walks in on her and Markus having sex. Weeping with shame, she screams at him to get out; Markus continues unfazed.
• Combo Platter Powers: So far only a small portion of the manual the Germans found has been translated, allowing access to only a small amount of the platter: physical enhancement, halo effect, Geltmensch psychic illusion effect, and Zephyr Super-Speed effect. Halo effect can be combined with physical enhancement and Geltmensch.
• Cool Chair:
  • Katyusha's throne, apparently shaped from a tree and carved with scenes of war.
  • Leah's wheelchair, apparently made from a tractor chassis.
• Cool Helmet:
  • The German tank-class Übers wear ornate steel helmets which make them easily recognizable in battle; the British supersoldiers, by contrast, wear ordinary infantry helmets with simple distinguishing markings.
  • The battleship-class Übers wear no helmets, presumably because their immense size leaves no doubt as to what they are. Leah Cohen is an exception, presumably due to the Allies' precaution with their ultimate weapon.
  • German Blitzmenschen have their own unique helmet design.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Leah does this to Tamara, the new child Battleship potential, before crushing the heads of two German sentries with her bare hands.
• Covers Always Lie: The covers will frequently show the Übers engaged in battles that don't actually occur in those issues.
• Crippling Over Specialization:
  • Heavy Battleship Leah Cohen is literally crippled by her enhancement, as her pure Heavy-type power set causes severe and agonising deformities. This is not seen in the regular Heavies, implying that the problems only manifest after too many activations of the "physical" type. A workaround is seen with HMH Dunkirk, who is given a single "halo" activation to balance his multiple physical ones. Leah then gets her own halo activation, as well, and is able to move about again.
  • Zephyrs cannot receive physical or halo enhancements, which makes them incredibly vulnerable on the field if the enemy catches them. It is further elaborated later to an annoyed General Patton that Zephyrs are not nearly as versatile as the average comic book speedster. They are incapable of moving more than a few hundred metres from their activation point, have just the two minute activation period after which they are left exhausted for a good day, and are unable to interact with anything other than Uber flesh due to a field their powers generate(though they can utilize their diamond blades as they are inside said field). Ultimately, while Zephyrs are proven Battleship killers with a fairly simple creation process which gives the Allies a significant edge, they simply do not posses wonder weapon levels of speed when compared to characters like The Flash.
  • Blitzmensch have only halo effect powers, with no physical enhancement. This makes them excellent distance fighters, but barely more durable than normal humans. So if any Uber gets up close to them (Tank-class are particularly suited for this), then they'll be killed in seconds.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Any fight between ordinary soldiers and Übers, or "tank"-level Übers against the much more powerful "battleships", or even when one side just gets the drop on another. In one scene, a German Über is literally curb-stomped to death by three British supersoldiers. The British Heavy Tank-class raids turn into this, as they take advantage of a weakness in Heavies that the defending German Heavy Tank Übers didn't know about.
  • Katyusha dominates her fight against Sieglinde, using her greater halo effect to blast back her foe and stay out of danger.
  • The US army retakes Okinawa rapidly once reinforced with enhanced humans. Even the Japanese foxholes and Uber sentries are worthless when the Americans simply either vaporise the guard, or drill through the side with their halo effect and kill the unsuspecting Japanese.
  • Leah Cohen tears a bloody swath through the Nazi firing line at Calais, with at least one Uber literally squashed under her boot.
  • The opening arc of Über: Invasion sees the Americans throw 300 of their Uber troops at Siegfried in an attempt to repeat the second battle of Kursk. Gets flipped into a crushing defeat for the Americans when Siegmund and a supporting force of blitzmensch ambush the American Ubers and Siegfried gets away with barely a scratch.
    • On the flip side, while this was going on roughly half of the Nazi invasion force was annihilated for no serious losses in a brief battle near Philadelphia.
  • Leah versus Battleship Zero. She simply rips and pounds it into mush.
    • In the same issue Maria in turn (while being backed up by three of her almost-activated Uber students), quite easily takes down Yamato and the surrounding Japanese forces at Irkutsk. And then faces one herself while taking a moment to bask in said victory, when her loyal Soviet students hit her by surprise with their halo effects.
  • The River's brothers versus Yamato, Tokyo's last serious defensive measure. Nowhere near full power and stuck in a wheelchair after facing Maria, Hideki gets knocked down after an exchange of halo effects, leaving him easy prey for Vernon to take his head off.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Possibly, if one contemplates the origin of the Uber creation process.
• Cynicism Catalyst: The death of Leon for Sieglinde.
• Darkest Hour: Britain faces this after the failure to stop the Nazi advance at the Battle of Calais, and the death of HMH Dunkirk and the crippling of Leah. Nazi Ubers begin gouging large chunks out of Southern England, with Dover being completely destroyed. Montgomery notes to the War Cabinet that they can expect London to start burning within the week, with few British Uber forces left to stop it and the only real hope left being the U.S. bringing their own enhanced strength into play.
• Dating Catwoman: A subversion, seeing as they're technically on the same side: before departing on her suicide mission, Sieglinde has sex with Siegfried, whom she hates. She refuses to let him kiss her, and tells him, "If it could have been anyone else, it would have".
• Deadly Euphemism: By Stalin:
  Send her East.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Hitler, first by a Geltmensch, then by an altered Goebbels.
• Death by Irony: After she survives Stalin's attempt to have her assassinated, Maria muses that he only valued her for her ability to create catalyst, and kills him by transmuting his entire body into a mass of catalyst.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Stalin sends 90 Soviet tank-class superhumans against the seemingly unstoppable V1 battleship-class Siegmund in Kursk. Siegmund loses his arm and flees, but at the cost of most of the Soviet force.
  • Leah Cohen is eventually disabled—though not killed—at Calais, following half an hour of sustained halo fire from Battleship Sieglinde and two Cruiser-class übers.
  • The Americans try "pulling a Kursk" by sending two forces of 300 tank-men and heavies to ambush one Nazi Battleship each, while the latter are weakened and resting from raids on Atlantic Coast cities. It's implied that it would have worked, if not for the Germans putting both of their battleships in the same place.
  • And then happens to Siegfried, literally, when the American Zephyrs make him bleed to death by using diamond edged scalpels to sever all his major arteries. This takes what is subjectively two minutes for him, but two weeks for them.
• Deceptive Disciple: Olesya appears to have been ordered to learn what she can from Maria, then kill her.
• Decoy Protagonist: The closest one the series seems to have is Stephanie, but even she may well die. No appealing character seems safe. Patrick/HMH Colossus and Winston Churchill are the best examples of this.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The series opens up with one, as the Allied Forces are just about to score victory over the Nazis (just like in real life) right before it's revealed they have a secret super weapon in their arsenal that turns the whole conflict on its head instantly.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Twice Geltmensch missions have been undone by one of their targets turning out to be Ubers. The Geltmensch tasked with wiping out the American high command of western Europe didn't expect General Patton to be an Uber himself, while Turing is able to disable the Bletchley Park spy.
  • The narrative wryly notes it would have been impossible for the Germans to predict the Allied attack in Uber Invasion #9. The Germans have the advantage in the Alps, with two Cruisers on a mountain peak and Sieglinde in support watching them: the Americans can hide from halo effects behind mountains, but the Germans can slowly advance peak by peak. So Patton has HMH Churchill literally thrown at the Cruisers—a unique Uber smuggled into the area, deployed in the battlefield in a unique way.
• Die or Fly: Maria can't explain how she produces catalyst, so the only way that she can "train" her pupils to do so is by driving them out into the tundra to survive on their own until they die from exhaustion, die from catalyst withdrawal symptoms, or instinctively make catalyst the way that she did.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: A just-enhanced Tamara tells Leah that she hates how the soldiers look at her now, and Leah responds that she won't ever get used to it. While both are now visibly living weapons, this can have a double meaning in that Tamara is 13-years-old, yet the catalyst treatment made her instantly go through puberty, meaning men looking at her sexually is a new concept for her.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • A tragic use of this trope is used when Alan Turing distinguishes the Nazi's genocidal homophobia from 1940s Britain's own anti-gay prejudice, saying he wants to live in a country where wouldn't be "hounded to his grave" for being gay. In real life, while not executed outright, Turing suffered horrible stigmatization and debilitating medical treatments forced upon him by postwar British law and society, driving him to suicide in 1954.
  • Japanese Tank Hideki remarks that he knew he was cursed, as an error in his compatibility test caused the machine to explode. Clearly neither he nor the Japanese know that this means he's a Battleship potential.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Many characters get sudden and unexpected deaths.
• Drop Pod: Hitler uses a converted V2 rocket to launch Sieglinde on a one-way mission to London. She survives the crash-landing and begins a rampage across the city.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: The five Zephyr-class Enhanced, who use their Super-Speed to kill Battleship Siegfried. Four of them are killed by his Halo powers along the way; the fifth, Charles Rivers, keeps cutting away with diamond knives until Siegfried succumbs to massive blood loss and Rivers' own powers literally burn out.
• Easy Logistics: The entire German train fleet and network was destroyed in May 1945. Worse, everything east of Germany and Austria proper was converted to Soviet-gauge. Yet the Germans seemingly have no problems operating hundreds of kilometers outside Germany itself, even as far as eastern Ukraine. Moreover the Soviets could hardly be expected to let the Germans take the oilfields of Balaton and Ploesti intact, but the Germans have no trouble finding enough petrol for another five months of ground operations and enough diesel to sail a fleet of a hundred U-boots to the eastern coast of the USA.
  • Averted in other portions of the story, however; it turns out that the Nazi war machine has crumbled so badly that the Übers are basically their only asset. As the war wears on, it becomes very clear that Germany as a whole is starving and has pretty much nothing beyond manpower.
• Emergency Impersonation: The Americans dress some ordinary soldiers as Zephyrs to try to intimidate the Germans while they try to create a second batch.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Katyusha goes from an incredible sniper to the most powerful Über.
• Enfant Terrible: Markus killed his first Jew as a prepubescent child, encouraged by his fanatical Nazi mother. It is later revealed that he had been born in 1931, meaning that "Siegfried" had only just been hitting his mid-teens through much of the series until his death in 1945.
• Ensemble Cast: The story moves back and forth between the European and Pacific theaters, with separate (often short-lived) main characters in each. Interestingly, the titular Übers are often sidelined as characters by key historical figures like Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Guderian.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Sieglinde and Siegmund are disgusted by the level of sadistic glee that their fellow Über, Siegfried, takes in his atrocities. After Siegfried single-handedly massacres hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWS on Hitler's orders, Sieglinde notes that if it had been her, she'd have refused.
  • When Anita Scheele, Sankt's assistant in the early Uber projects, finds out Doctor Mengele is assigned to a program to create a new Hitler, she balks, protesting that he's a poor choice to run the program. When told the program requires someone with a lack of "moral squeamishness," she scoffs that in that case, he's "overqualified."
• Everyone Has Standards: Dunkirk. When he's about to parachute from a plane with Leah, he swears, then immediately apologizes for using poor language in front of a lady. (And this just before he admits to fighting in wars "the better part of [his] life" and that killing doesn't bother him as much as he thinks it should!) Later, when he throws the injured Leah from the field, turns back to the Nazis who were attacking her and:
  Dunkirk: "Now that the lady's left, let's have it, you fucking cunts!"
• Everything's Better with Samurai: The Japanese Heavy Tank Man armour has a distinct samurai look, possibly for propaganda reasons.
• Eye Beams: The crudest and most common use of the Übers' disruption halos. The tank-class Übers fire webs of blue-white lightning that coalesce on their targets and rip through flesh and armour.
  • The V1 Battleships do the same on a far larger scale, but Siegfried can also manifest actual beams while Siegmund has been shown to generate disruption "rings" that slice opponents like blades.
  • The Blitzmenschen generate halos of far greater range and strength than normal Panzermench, allowing them to sink ships from kilometres away.
  • Katyusha Maria, possibly the first Blitzmensch Battleship, has a halo that can destroy multiple city blocks in a single glance. Her blasts are so powerful that the surrounding wildlife literally drop dead from the electrostatic charge that the halos create as a side-effect.
• Eyepatch of Power: HMH Dunkirk has a spiffy green one underneath his mask.
• Eye Scream:
  • Stephanie shoots the Über Rudolph Gelt through the eye. This causes his disruption halo to overload, blowing his head apart.
  • Siegfried's signature execution involves him melting his victim's eyes out of their skull. General Sankt winds up on the receiving end of this after defying Hitler. Ironically, part of his death is due to having his eye cut open by a Zephyr as he tries to use his halo, causing half of his skull to be blown off.
  • In Über Special #1, it turns out Siegfried has been doing this since before he was enhanced – as a child, he killed a Jew by burning his eyes out with molten lead.
  • Battleship Zero has one eye hanging out of its face, at the end of a long bundle of nerve fibers.
  • Geltmensch Conrad is deprived of his halo effect by having his eyes destroyed.
  • The Zephyr's assault on Siegfried results in his eye being sliced open, and his disruption halo misfires, destroying part of his head
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: The super-soldiers are humans, obviously, but they're also ranked according to their potential power, and those ranks are named for ship classes: cruiser, destroyer, battleship, etc. So, just like ships, each soldier has a prefix denoting their nation of origin preceding their chosen name; for the British, it's HMH (His Majesty's Human). Leah Cohen is officially called HMH Churchill, for example.
• Fastball Special: To get around Leah's lack of mobility, Patton and the Americans deploy her against some Nazi Cruisers by having one of their own heavy destroyers throw her at them. It works.
• Fate Worse than Death: Scheele is ordered to be mutilated in a way that leaves her with her halo powers but renders her unable to speak or write, after she is recorded suggesting to Sieglinde that she defect.
• Fingerpoke Of Doom: Angered by Patton's Jerkass insulting of her, Leah flicks him with one finger and sends him flying a hundred feet in the air. Due to himself being a tank, he survives uninjured despite making a crater in the ground.
• Flashback Nightmare: Leah has one to the events of the Battle of Calais at the beginning of Invasion #9.
• Food Pills: After their enhancement, Übers can only eat a type of concentrated nutrient paste, as they need constant nourishment to support their massive new bodies. Even when having an official dinner with Hitler, Siegmund has a bowl of the stuff.
• Foreshadowing:
  • After witnessing Siegfried personally massacre several thousand of the million Soviet POW marked for execution, Heinz Guderian prays to God hoping the Soviets never get their hands on a monster like him. Then we cut to Katyusha fleeing in the crowd...
  • In the early issues of the series, Siegmund seems to spend a lot of time idly playing around with his disruption halo, making carvings and suchlike. He's practicing to get the precision he needs to silently assassinate Hitler.
• Four-Star Badass: General Patton, who ends up being one of the few surviving generals after discovering he's an Über potential. He's a bit of a Jerkass, but his skill as a battlefield commander is as clear as ever.
• Fragile Speedster: The Zephyr-Class Ubers possess superhuman speed, but normal strength and durability.
• Framing Device: It appears that the text boxes that appear in the comic are excerpts from a history written after the war. Significant events in Über history such as Sieglinde's crossing of the Rhine are dated and noted, and issue 21 refers to scholarly debate about the war and study of halo architecture.
• Full-Frontal Assault: One Über is forced to fight his way through Bletchley Park naked.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The German battleships are outfitted with these as part of a new look.
• Gender Is No Object: Played with, but largely averted. None of the militaries of the time had female soldiers, with the sole exception of the Soviets and their snipers (like Maria). Men and women seem to be equally likely to be catalyst-sensitive. However, in every nation seen so far, women are activated only when they have more potential than a tank-man: Sieglinde, Leah Cohen, Tamara, the fake Sieglinde, and Maria's trainees. (Maria herself is something of an exception, having been in one of the mass-activated "penal battalions." They had no idea whether she had any potential at all, much less battleship-class.) Scheele is also activated, but again, she seems to have been a special case, as Sankt's assistant. In a war increasingly fought only between enhanced humans, you'd think more nations would realize that they could double their forces if they started activating women as well.
• Gentle Giant: Both HMH Colossus and HMH Churchill are this to varying degrees, far more so with Churchill.
• Giant Mook:
  • The British "heavy" Übers are a rare heroic example; they're easily twelve feet tall, far more powerful than the standard tank-class Übers, and are covered in intimidating suits of armour. Unfortunately, they are still completely outclassed by the V1 Battleship class, and the first batch bravely sacrifice themselves trying to defend London from Sieglinde. The Germans soon develop their own Heavies.
  • The Heavy Battleship Leah Cohen is several times the height of a normal human, but her body is a severely deformed and disproportionate slab of muscle.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The German "Blitzmenschen", who have very powerful Disruption Halo powers but no super strength/super durability.
  • Katyusha is this, comparatively speaking. While she's capable of withstanding battleship-level halo attacks, in theory a battleship could still use their superior strength to tear her limb from limb, but her halo effect is so powerful that nobody's ever gotten close enough.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Whenever the supersoldiers activate their Disruption Halo eye beams. Patton has almost constantly glowing eyes, which seems to be either a side-effect of him being angry so often, or deliberately done to intimdate his troops.
• A God Am I: After Maria becomes incomparably stronger than any other character as far as the halo effect is concerned, toys with the idea, calling herself the atheist god, never letting people know for sure if she's joking or serious. Then when she annihilates the Kremlin, dissolves the Soviet Union and declares its former territory an anarchist land with herself as protector of the civilians, a horrified Leah asks her not to play god. Her response? "Do not worry. There is no play."
• God-Emperor: After Maria kills Stalin and dissolves the Soviet Union, she declares Russia to be an "anarchy" and herself its "protector", a superhuman who considers herself a god.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • When the Germans make it back into central Ukraine and are literally unstoppable despite their utter lack of conventional forces, a working supply chain, or even an industrial base Stalin becomes desperate. So desperate, he re-assigns the 420,000 soldiers captured during the Berlin offensive from Penal Battalion duty to Uber-testing... even though the British haven't told them how to safely identify Uber-potentials. Almost all of them die, but they do get enough Ubers to finally stop the Germans and thereby save the people of eastern Belarus and Ukraine.
  • Churchill decides against using poison gas against the German Übers (although gas is said to be of very little use against them).
  • Played with in Invasion #13. In a notable testament to how their Uber advantage in the war is increasingly slipping away, the Nazi's quite literally throw Battleship Zero, a fleshy , once-human thing, with the sole compulsion to kill anything it encounters, into a fight against Maria at the Battle of Minsk. Zero's unique bodily form proves quite impervious against Maria's halo effect, who in turn only survives through quick thinking.
• Gorn: Even by the standards of Avatar Press, this has some extreme gore. Possibly the nastiest example is Colossus' death by having his arms ripped off, followed by his entire upper body being twisted into a modern-art nightmare, and then finally, five hours later, having an industrial drill pushed through his skull to end his misery. Although there's strong competition from the close-up splash page of Sankt getting his face MELTED off.
• Gotta Kill Them All: By Invasion #16, the real-world leaders of the four most prominent nations in WWII (from a European perspective) have all been killed by Battleships:
  • Churchill is decapitated by Sieglinde in her terror raid on London.
  • Hitler is murdered by an induced heart attack by Siegmund.
  • Truman is killed by Siegfried in his halo-destruction of the White House.
  • Stalin is killed by having his entire body transmuted into catalyst, after Maria survives his attempt to have her assassinated and decides to respond in kind.
• Green Thumb: Katyusha causes a bed of roses to grow from mud with her halo to make a joke.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • Katyusha. Turns out that Katyusha Maria's hand has completely regenerated as her Über activation progresses.
  • Siegmund loses an arm in a Soviet ambush, but seals the wound so he can flee and recuperate. He's back on the frontlines before long.
  • HMH Dunkirk aka Howard is missing an eye. Explains why he was designed to be a Heavy Destroyer, with a diminished halo effect.
  • HMH Churchill aka Leah Cohen loses a leg in the Battle of Calais and suffers further loss of mobility due to her joints seizing up. This doesn't stop her from being a fearsome close-range fighter if she can be lobbed into the enemy. She is no longer a cripple after Maria heals her leg in Invasion #16.
• Healing Factor: A minor power of Ubers, not often seen as most combatants get killed instantly, which seems to be linked to the Halo Effect enhancement.
  • Sieglinde's burns slowly heal over the course of Uber Invasion, and she eventually no longer needs a wheelchair.
  • The most impressive healing feat is Katyusha returning from apparently being burned alive by three Destroyer's Halo Effects.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: The German Übers all wear oversized black leather uniforms with various SS-style decorations. Sieglinde's uniform is so form-fitting it practically qualifies as a Spy Catsuit.
• Hero Unit: Rare non-video game example. The various Übers–especially the Battleship class–are larger than regular human soldiers, with strength, durability, and Halo Effects that make them so powerful and dangerous that entire new military doctrines need to be developed to accommodate them.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: As the main batch of Soviet Übers leave Maria's camp, a local peasant makes an obscene gesture at them. It's implied in the narration that the locals feared that their presence might invite an enemy attack.
• Heroic Lineage: Über potential is apparently genetic, as both the American O'Connor brothers and Rivers brothers are all potential Battleship-class.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • HMH Dunkirk aka Howard literally throws Leah to safety during the Battle of Calais after temporarily distracting the fake Siegmund. He then gets quickly torn apart by both "Sieglinde" and "Siegmund's" disruption halos as he tries to take them on by himself.
  • The last of the Zephyrs drives himself to death by exhaustion in order to finish off Siegfried after the death of the rest of the squad.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • Increasingly, the Allies are forced to resort to more brutal and dehumanizing tactics to fend off the Übers. Stephanie in particular was perfectly willing to commit crimes against humanity to maintain her cover as a Nazi scientist. Even then however, the Allies at large seem to be aware of this trope as they still refuse to go all the way in the same manner the Nazis have.
  • The Allied "heavy" Übers, designed to destroy "tank"-class Übers at close range, are described as literally monstrous to look at. Leah Cohen, the first Heavy Battleship, looks even worse. She is still humanoid, but her limbs and torso are misshapen and horribly disproportionate due to massive muscle growth.
  • Leah is disgusted by her own actions in overseeing the activation of the barely-teenage battleship potential Tamara, and says that if things had gone wrong, she would have killed everyone involved including herself.
• High-Pressure Blood:
  • When the Nazi V1 battleship Siegmund gets his arm blown off in battle with the Soviet Übers, his blood pressure is so strong that the wound sprays blood three MILES away. It's surprising he doesn't lose his entire blood supply in ten seconds; rather, he escapes into a forest and cauterizes the wound with his disruption halo.
  • The death of Siegfried demonstrates the effectiveness of simply piercing the skin as an anti-Battleship tactic: if their halo effect has been hindered, they cannot seal the wound and prevent blood loss. Battleships' blood pressure is far too strong for clotting to take effect.
  • During the Battle of Calais, Leah's right knee is destroyed, leaving her lower leg hanging by a thin strand of flesh. Her arterial spray is strong enough to reach a mile into the sky, alerting a nearby HMH Dunkirk.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: While a number of real-world figures naturally participate in the war and have moments of badassery, there are a few quite literal examples of people who turn out to be catalyst-sensitive. Specifically, Alan Turing and General Patton both reveal themselves to be enhanced when taking out Geltmenschen.
• Historical Domain Character: Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin make prominent appearances, as do various real Nazi generals, Dr Mengele, Alan Turing and even Virginia Woolf. Churchill is portrayed surprisingly even-handedly compared to his idealised depiction in many UK and US WWII works, with such characteristics as drunkenly making tactical decisions, talking disparagingly about the British lower classes and battling depression to match his clear heroic leadership. In Invasion #14, Stephanie even alludes to the controversy over whether his wartime policies caused the 1943 Bengal famine. Previously having only a cameo in issue five, Bernard Montgomery replaces Churchill as Stephanie's confidant in issue seventeen.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • Hitler, on a power high with his new super soldiers, orders and enjoys the mass slaughter of POWs. He shunned personal participation in atrocities in real life, though probably less due to squeamishness than reasons of Plausible Deniability.
  • General Shiro Ishii of Japan's Unit 731 is placed in charge of Japan's Uber Program.
• Historical Villain Downgrade: Magda Goebbels hates her husband and is appalled that he planned on poisoning their children. In reality, she had planned on poisoning them a month before doing it as seen in Downfall.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: During the Battle of Calais, repeated halo blasts from Siegmund and Sieglinde manage to snap only a single ligament in Leah Cohen's knee. Without the ligament to balance them out, her remaining ultra-strong muscles nearly tear the lower leg clean off.
• Hollywood Tactics: It's never really quite explained why all the Übers rely mainly on Good Old Fisticuffs (when they're not using their exhausting Halo effect) to kill each other, considering that their strength could easily let them carry artillery pieces (specifically established early on as a viable means of killing Übers) like rifles to shoot each other with. It's understandable why the Germans don't do this, considering that their entire war machine has been destroyed, but the fact that the Allies don't do it too is a tad baffling. A bunch of Übers with handheld 128mm cannons firing at each other from tens of kilometers away would have been a far better use of their super strength.
• Hope Spot: Über: Invasion #4 has one for the first part of its issue; Stephanie finds a Destroyer and tankman-class Über among the British resistance but an occupying patrol interrupts them and both candidates are killed. #4 as a whole may turn out to be one of these (although it really is too early to tell, remember that the series is barely half-over at this point) with Stephanie discovering a new Battleship-potential and Turing identifying a new type of Über.
• Human Resources: Duncan suggests that if Leah Cohen dies her skeleton could be used to make anti-Uber armour. HMH Dunkirk is disgusted by this.
• Human Weapon: A key theme of the series. The Übers aren't people, they're weapons of mass destruction, designed and manufactured to order; they even have crews of handlers to relay orders and spot targets for them. At one point, Siegmund advises Sieglinde to think of herself as a weapon to help deal with her guilt.
• I Am the Noun: After General Sankt denounces Hitler for leading Germany to ruin, Hitler has his new Super-Soldier Markus/Siegfried melt off Sankt's face before sneering "I am Germany".
• Ignored Epiphany:
  • Sieglinde (and by extension Nazi Germany) is handily defeated by Maria and yet she (and the German and Japanese Command) continues to fight her twice, only winning once because of the element of surprise (using Battleship Zero). This is especially egregious given that Maria refused to invade Germany, meaning that she intentionally chose to let Germany go unpunished for invasion.
  • Sieglinde is exhausted by the war and battle, and yet she refuses to surrender to the Soviets and end the war.
  • Maria tries to educate Yammato that his Undying Loyalty to Japan is misplaced is ignored, as he later fights to the death for the Emperor, when the Americans were willing to spare him in his crippled condition.
• Immune to Bullets: The Übers can merrily wade through heavy-caliber gunfire unharmed; in the case of the Battleships Ubers, even anti-tank shells simply bounce off their skin. Doesn't stop the Allied soldiers from repeatedly subjecting them to a Worf Barrage.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Maria impales her Deceptive Disciple Olesya and the two other followers who tried to kill her on halo-created trees.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: It's frequent and understandable for everyone in the war rooms. Gillen himself has joked that Stephanie's true love is booze.
• In Spite of a Nail: In spite of the far worse strategic position in Europe, the atomic bombs are still planned to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in part because of the German blockade of the Atlantic fleet.
• Insufferable Genius: After Sankt's death, the Nazi generals describe him as this while trying to study his work on the Übers; he was apparently "the kind of genius who needs to let everyone know he's a genius."
• Invaded States of America: Uber: Invasion features an invasion of the continental United States by an army of Nazi super soldiers. They proceed to rampage across the country in scorched earth tactics and destroy numerous cities, including New York City and Washington D.C., while the Americans attempt to stall them while building their own super soldiers. Then the Japanese attack with their own super soldier on the West Coast in a more haphazard guerilla campaign. The invasion is finally halted when the Japanese turn their attention to the Soviet Union, and out of the two Nazi "Battleship" Ubers spearheading the campaign, one is killed, while the other defects, causing the rest of the Nazi invasion force to either surrender or commit suicide to prevent their capture.
• It Only Works Once: This is essentially the defining strategic doctrine of enhanced humans in the war, as laid out in the theories of General Sankt, whose ideas continue to define the Ubers' use even after his death early in the series. If one side has a technological advantage, that advantage must be used to maximum possible effect with plans on how to exploit the victory, rather than tested in minor engagements with no plans for follow-through. Sankt notes the specific example of poison gas during the Great War; the Germans used it experimentally at first on a small skirmish rather than a strategically important battle. The French retreated and the defensive line was torn open, but the Germans had no plan to exploit this victory. By the time they were "ready" to use gas in larger engagements, their enemies had time to develop countermeasures such as gas masks, and the advantage had been lost. In practice, this means that Ubers are best used in novel, completely unexpected forms of attack, because by the second time a particular tactic is attempted, the other side will have had time to develop a counter-tactic.
  Guderian: If you have a technological edge, use it with intent. You use it as big and as hard as you can, as that first unexpected blow will hurt. Novelty has a value all its own.
  • One of the clearest examples of this doctrine is shown with the use of one of the "specialty" classes of Uber. The first use of Zephyrs is a massive success, resulting in the death of a battleship, albeit at the cost of all the Zephyrs' lives. However, the second use of Zephyrs, an attempt on Sieglinde using the exact same tactic, is an ignominious failure, because the Nazis managed to develop a mass halo attack pattern by Sieglinde and her escorts that would destroy any Zephyrs in the area, to be initiated as soon as she felt a twinge of pain that could be the start of a Zephyr attack.
  • Stephanie uses this doctrine when she assists in the attack on the U-Boat bunkers. Normally, the British heavies and standard tank-men would be crushed by the German heavies, tank-men, and blitzmensch, but the Germans are unaware that heavies have weak kneecaps, allowing for another heavy to take them out with relative ease. By exploiting this weakness, the British manage to achieve all their objectives with minimal casualties.
• It's Personal: Zigzagged for Eamonn O'Conner. He really does want to avenge his brother and stop the Axis from hurting anymore people, but he's also scared out of his mind and worries that his work could be for nothing.
• Jailbait Taboo: After the reveal that Siegfried was actually 14 years old despite looking like a grown man because of his enhancements, it makes Sieglinde's shame about having sex with him (because he was the only candidate available who wouldn't be killed by her super strength) even more understandable.
• Jack of All Stats: V1 Battleships. Their sheer power allows them to overwhelm other Ubers of the Tank, Destroyer, and Cruiser classes. However this leaves them vulnerable to Katyusha: the power and range of her halo effect means they cannot easily get close enough to attack.
• The Kid with the Leash: Battleship Zero turns out to have a soft spot for Sieglinde and treats her as its "mistress", in a way that bemuses everyone.^note Although fans theorize the possibility that the reports of Sieglinde's husband's death were faked and Zero is, in fact, Sieglinde's husband.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: In the final issue of the main series, Stephanie is packing up a large number of catalyst tests so she can continue testing potentials even after Britain falls to the Nazis. Duncan comes in and she tells him what she's doing, and then asks him whether he's going to report her. He gets as far as "Of course I—" before Stephanie shoots him in the head. It's genuinely ambiguous whether he would have said he would or wouldn't report her; Duncan was an unlikable asshole, but he was still firmly on the same side as Stephanie.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In Über: Invasion #17, the death of Yamato prompts Emperor Hirohito to announce the unconditional surrender of Japan, ending the war in the Pacific.
• Large and in Charge:
  • All superhumans grow at least an extra foot in height, as well as impressive musculature to match. The V1 battleship Übers are noticeably larger than the "tank" class, standing close to nine feet tall. They are also significantly heavier – during the battle for Berlin, Markus/Siegfried is shown crushing a Soviet soldier to death simply by stepping on him.
  • Averted with Katyusha, who is at first believed to be a failed Über and remains tiny in stature. In truth she is a Battleship of the blitz/halo type. Even fully completed, she's much smaller than normal.
  • The "heavy" Übers are even bigger than the "battleships", but not as strong. They are much stronger than "tank" Übers, though.
  • Leah Cohen is at least five times taller than a normal person, dwarfing even the standard V1 battleships.
  • The series is actually an inversion of the idea, as despite their incredible power, almost all the Übers are soldiers and follow orders from their ordinary human superiors as usual. It's possibly played straight by Katyusha, who knows she's too powerful for anyone on her side to control and so basically does what she likes, but she's ironically the smallest of the Battleship class. Finally played straight, however, when it turns out General Patton is an Über.
• "Last Supper" Steal: The wraparound cover variant for Invasion #16 does a parody of Leonardo's Last Supper with Maria and the other second-generation Soviet supers.
• Legacy Character: Eamonn O'Connor is named USS Battleship Colossus after his deceased brother, Patrick 'HMH Battleship Colossus' O'Connor.
• Lie to the Beholder: This is the power of Geltmenschen - their apparent shapeshifting is actually a form of telepathic mind control, and they can be detected by photography.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Übers are superhumanly strong, durable and agile. However, they still need to use conventional vehicles to travel long distances. The Heavy Übers are even faster, and the Heavy Battleship Leah Cohen can run at over 180 miles per hour.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Geltmenschen's special ability is psychic, so they can't fake fluency in other languages and can't deceive cameras.
  • Zephyrs operate at incredible speeds and a timeframe drastically lengthened compared to normal humans'. Therefore their energy reserves are used up within two minutes of constant fighting, while most Ubers can operate for hours at a time. Additionally, using their powers is incredibly psychologically taxing: they have to push against air resistance, so even from their perspective they feel as if they're moving slowly through treacle for weeks on end in silence.
  • Enhanced humans need to be able to see their target to use their Halo effect. So the Alps act as a natural defence against them, hindering their vision and progress.
• Long-Range Fighter: Katyusha's specialty due to her lesser physical enhancement.
• Lost in Translation: An in-universe example, combined with a Visual Pun. In issue #17 of Über: Invasion, Siegmund is told he'll be participating in a decapitation attack. He pauses, then asks his translator, "We're not actually beheading someone, right?" Later that issue, Battleship Yamato is killed via a focused halo blast to the neck, and his head removed.
• The Lost Lenore: Sieglinde's wartime life is defined by seeking revenge for her lost husband Leon, who was brain-damaged in the war and then killed in the bombing of Dresden.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: How the enhancements can appear at times, considering Leah and Battleship Zero's later forms.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Whenever the Übers engage ordinary troops, the latter are inevitably reduced to fountains of blood, severed limbs and shattered bones. The series' artist devotes some truly beautiful splash pages to these gorefests.
• Magic Pants:
  • Most "battleship" Übers are nearly indestructible, but their clothes are just outsized versions of ordinary uniforms. Therefore, during battle they sometimes get stripped almost naked by enemy fire...except for their pants, of course.
  • Averted in Sieglinde #1/2, when Sieglinde fights a tank-class Über for the first time. Her clothes are entirely gone within seconds, as the Über's disruption halo disintegrates them – not that this stops her from tearing him in half with one punch.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: One of the lower-class Übers, Anita Scheele, teaches herself to use her halo effect with surgical precision, allowing her to change the face of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels so he can assume the identity of the dead Adolf Hitler. However, to reach this level she had to hone her skills on hundreds of human test subjects who all died before she could perfect the process. Even then, she has to "fix up" Goebbels' new face every so often, since it will slowly fall apart, demonstrated when he pulls off one of his ears.
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: V1 battleships can only have sex with other V1 Battleships, since intercourse with ordinary humans would end badly. Tank men, and those who don't receive physical enhancements, such as Geltmensch, can still have sex with normal people.
• Meaningful Name: The German V1 "battleships" take their code-names from characters in Richard Wagner's operatic Ring Cycle (Hitler was a huge Wagner fan in real life).
  • In Über Special #1, Sieglinde discusses the dark significance of her namesake, a tragic heroine who poisons her husband. Her main motivation is guilt over her husband's death in the Allied destruction of Dresden.
  • A Katyusha was a type of Soviet rocket artillery. Rather apt nickname for someone who is now a living artillery piece. Maria complains that it's a poor comparison however, because she's a precision sniper while Katyusha rockets were notoriously inaccurate and used for sudden 'saturation' bombardments.
  • Word of God states that the "battleships" are so named because, like the real-life naval battleships of the war, they are hugely powerful, extremely expensive and inspire fear with their very names.
• Mercy Kill: Patrick/Colossus gets one after being horribly mutilated but not killed by Sieglinde. His skull is so tough it takes five hours to pierce it with an industrial drill.
• Mighty Glacier: HMH Churchill. Although she can run very quickly, she possesses very low maneuverability otherwise. Once engaged, stronger Ubers can play a game of "keep away" by using their superior dexterity to avoid Churchill's tremendous strength. Due to her extreme durability, generally it takes at least a Cruiser class to even scratch her.
• Military Superhero: Colossus for the Allies; Sieglinde, Siegfried and Siegmund for the Germans. Later battleships are less glorified in the setting.
• A Million Is a Statistic: How Stalin justifies jumpstarting the Soviets' own Uber program fast enough to confront the Nazis.
• Mineral Macguffin: Woden's Blood, a red crystalline substance which is almost instantly fatal—except for 1 in 5,000, for whom it is a Super Serum. Just making it relatively difficult and requires an industrial production base. Katyusha Maria can create her own Woden's Blood, seemingly by using her disruption halo to alter the chemical composition of other substances.
• Monumental Damage:
  • When the Übers assault Paris, the Allies destroy the Eiffel Tower to deny the Germans using it as a strategic vantage point. Later, Sieglinde destroys Nelson's Column in London at the start of her rampage.
  • The German attack on the USA begins with the entire White House being halo-warped into a giant swastika.
  • The Statue of Liberty gets her head halo-warped into a swastika during the attack on New York.
• Mundane Utility: A Soviet scientist discusses how Woden's Blood could be used as an incredibly effective chemical weapon instead of creating superhumans, since it kills most people upon even skin contact. However, the stuff decays quickly when exposed to air, so they can't really deploy it, or afford to waste it.
  • At one point, Sieglinde uses her disruption halo to dye her hair.
  • Siegmund lights a cigarette during an interview with his halo.
  • Stephanie rides Leah Cohen like a horse during a trip to London. Justified in that Cohen can run at 180 mph.
  • Maria's disruption halo can turn soil into a nutritious sweet paste for food, which is edible to both humans and Übers with no ill effects (so far). She also uses her halo to create diamonds and clear the road just so Soviet jeeps can drive through.
  • Scheele uses her halo to sculpt, showing a level of precision which has her put in a program as a surgeon for Übers.
  • The historical notes narrating the series say that Halo architecture and Halo Art become known phenomena later.
• Must Have Nicotine: Stephanie smokes a lot, combining this with Cigarette of Anxiety.
• Never Gets Drunk: One Über, Lupin Schultz, laments that he barely gets drunk due to his superhuman physiology, despite having just downed seven large steins of beer.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Invoked in a way that whitewashes Germany's real-life War Crimes. Hitler and Siegfried massacre tens of thousands of Soviet POWs to avoid having to feed them. In-story, General Guderian believes that this is a unique event that will lead to a) no one surrendering to them ever again, and b) retaliation against the Nazi POWs currently in Soviet hands. The actual number of Soviet POW killed by the Germans during the war was 3.3 million (albeit through indirect means including starvation, exposure to the elements, non-existent medical treatment, and over-work), though one can make the argument that Guderian didn't know the exact numbers (e.g. he might have thought it was just two million).
  • Siegmund assassinates Hitler, prompting Goebbels to take on his appearance and become the new Fuhrer, proving himself far more frighteningly competent and just as depraved.
• No Endor Holocaust: Averted – the series makes it very clear that the Übers cause massive civilian casualties. Especially when the Nazis begin their "Great Burn" of Europe and begin their invasion of America.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: US enhanced humans stitch designs onto the back of their jackets similar to nose art on warplanes.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: For certain values of "normal" and "tiny," anyway. After seeing tank-men slaughtered by the dozens by Battleship-class Übers, it's easy to forget that even the weakest Übers are still enhanced far beyond human levels. And when Stephanie discovers the Geltmensch mole in Bletchley Park, you see a normal human being attacked by a bulletproof super-soldier who can break walls with his bare hands and vaporize people with his eyes.
• Nuke 'em: Used in a trap for Siegmund. Twice, first by the Americans and then the Japanese.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The reaction of ordinary humans who realize they're facing Übers. Usually followed seconds later by an exceptionally bloody death.
  • The American naval commanders, when they figure out that their ships have been destroyed by Japanese Über frogmen.
  • The American tank commander who tries to protect Stephanie, when he sees the Über Rudolph Gelt survive a near hit by a tank shell.
  • Also, the reaction of Siegmund's communications officer when he sees 90 Soviet supersoldiers rise up out of their hiding places.
  • Churchill's reaction when he hears Sieglinde is attacking London: "Oh, balls".
  • Siegfried's face when he sees the scale of Katyusha Maria's halo effect for the first time. It's incredibly satisfying.
  • The reaction of the reader (both in-universe and out) of the historical narration in the climax of the Great Burn, as it's revealed that Siegmund and Siegfried have led led a force of Ubers to invade the East Coast of America.
  Narrator: "America at that point had suffered 1/35th of the casualties of the USSR. This would soon change."
• One-Man Army:
  • The "battleship"-class super soldiers, such as Sieglinde, Siegmund and Siegfried. Their appearance on the field always ends in the enemy force either retreating or getting completely annihilated. Sieglinde destroys central Paris almost single-handedly, then easily demolishes much of London. Siegmund reconquers the Balkans and Ukraine almost single-handedly. Siegfried annihilates tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners by looking at them.
  • The Allies later get one of their own in Patrick "H.M.H. Colossus" O'Connor, although he is deployed before he can be fully enhanced, leading to his death at Sieglinde's hands. Thereafter, several potential Allied "battleship" candidates emerge - the Americans' Eamonn O'Connor aka Razor (Colossus' younger brother) and brothers Vernon and Freddie Rivers, the British Leah Cohen, and the USSR's "Katyusha" Maria Andreevna.
  • Maria is perhaps the best example, as she is literally capable of destroying a city single-handedly with her halo bombardments.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted when the last surviving Zephyr of the team that killed Siegfried is called Rivers, but is not closely related to the US battleship brothers.
• Only Sane Man: General Sankt on the Nazi side; he wants victory but objects to Hitler's growing madness. Does not turn out well for him.
• Out of the Inferno: Maria does this for her final confrontation with Sieglinde.
• Perception Filter: This is apparently how the super-spies work, as they can fool enemies without Shapeshifting. It's for that reason that they can be spotted with cameras, as it doesn't work on reproduced images.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Maria even post-multiple activations retains her diminutive stature, but is well on her way to achieving Battleship-class abilities. She takes on a dozen Soviet tank-class Übers, twice as many human soldiers, and two actual tanks, and wins completely unscathed. When fully activated she gains some height, but even so, she can pass as a normal human unlike every other battleship.
  • Britain's second ever battleship-potential is the daughter of a destroyer and tankman-potentials. She's thirteen.
• Point of Divergence: Rather than giving funding to Wernher von Braun and the V-2 project as he did in real life, Hitler instead gave it to General Sankt and the Uber project, which ends up producing a far more potent wunderwaffe than anyone could have ever imagined.
• Politically Correct History: Averted. The Americans deliberately withhold full activation from their Black battleship potentials to keep them from being too troublesome if they demand civil rights, the British never test their non-white colonial subjects because they might oppose British Imperialism, and no-one even raises the possibility of helping Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China develop Übers.
  • The US discovers a new type of activation with unknown effects, which kills the first men to undergo it. Naturally, they test it on African-Americans.
  • The five Zephyrs who killed Battleship Siegfried and saved the critical industrial hub of Detroit are posthumously given the USA's second-highest award for courage. They qualified for the highest, but didn't get it because they were Black.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Expected, considering the Nazis are the villains of the story. But even the honorable and likable Anti-Villain Siegmund mocks the idea that a "Jew girl" like Leah could ever have been a threat. Then it's Averted since it is a fake Siegmund that mocks Leah.
• Power Incontinence: Katyusha causes an explosion, apparently by accident, when suffering through her transformation.
  • When having a Catapult Nightmare, Razor accidentally releases a halo blast that destroys his bedroom wall.
• Power Levels: The various nations in the war have a set of classifications for their super soldiers, named after ship classes, based on how many catalyst "activations" an individual can safely take. The most common number of activations is two, which produces a "tank-man." On the other end of the scale, there are "battleships," who can have up to 24 activations. Later, two new classes of supers are discovered: "destroyers," who can take six activations, and "cruisers," who can take 12. However, even these numbers are not an absolute determination of relative strength; it's noted that a destroyer with 5 physical activations is slightly stronger than a cruiser with 6. Additionally, while the standard procedure is an equal mix of the "physical" activations and the "halo" activations, producing an enhanced human with a degree of both Super-Strength and long-range halo-effect, the mix can be altered. Most destroyers get equal activations (3 of physical, 3 of halo, or "3:3"), but HMH Dunkirk, whose missing eye limits his long-range effectiveness, got a 5:1 mix of physical and halo activations. The three German battleships all appear to have received a 12:12 mix, but the first British battleship has almost solely physical activations, making her far stronger and tougher than even other battleships. Even the tank-men can receive an equal mix, producing a "panzermensch," two physical activations, producing a "heavy," or two halo activations, making a "blitzmensch." The "exotic" classes are not part of this naming scheme, having far more specialized and limited powers, and thus less battlefield potential.
• The Power of Hate: A key motivation for several characters. Klaudia/Sieglinde seeks revenge on the Allies for the death of her disabled husband in the Dresden bombings; Markus/Siegfried hates the Jews and other perceived "traitors" who caused Germany to surrender in WW1; Leah Cohen wants to become a Heavy battleship-class Über to wreak revenge on the Nazis for the Holocaust. It emerges that Siegmund's deepest desire was to kill Hitler, thus avenging all his comrades who died in the Soviet-German War. He succeeds.
• President Superhero: After the Soviet leadership attempts (but fails) to have Maria killed because of her unreliability, she flattens the Kremlin before killing Stalin. She then decides to rule Russia by herself and replace communism with anarchism, declaring herself the "Protector" of the new state.
• Propaganda Hero: When the Nazis develop Super Soldiers at the end of World War II, prolonging the conflict significantly, the "Übers" quickly become figures in Nazi propaganda, particularly Siegfried and Sieglinde, both of whom seem to embody the Nazi phenotypical ideal of being blonde, tall, and having a Heroic Build. Of course, since we're talking about Nazis, they're ruthlessly massacring enemy soldiers and civilians alike.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Possible if an Über over-exerts themselves.
• Punch a Wall: Vernon nearly does this in frustration at Yamato's failure to face him in open battle, then restrains himself on realising that the shrapnel created as a result could kill any nearby unaugmented human.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Most, if not all of the battles considered victories for the Allies are considered this.
  • The Axis powers are also fully aware that any victory they may enjoy after the Ubers save them from the brink will be bittersweet at best.
• The Quiet One: HMH Dunkirk is noted for his anti-social behavior in his first appearance.
• Race Lift: In-universe. The entire first generation of Zephyr-class Übers were Black men who were experimented on and died in combat. The news article revealing their existence to the world showed a picture of a white man in a Zephyr uniform. Given that the racism in the American program is a major recurring theme, it seems deliberate.
• Reality Warper: The true power of distortion halos, which can twist matter so precisely that they can kill a man without even breaking his skin.
  • Sieglinde uses her power to dye her hair blonde; she is aware of her importance in propaganda, but peroxide no longer affects her.
  • At Kiev, Katyusha's fully-powered halo turns an entire river to ice and steel, and then creates a massive steel pillar out of thin air. Since she has the greatest halo effect in the world, she can perform such acts as creating Woden's Blood, diamonds, nutrient paste, and roses from other materials. She reaches near the limit of the intricacy of her powers when she heals Leah's leg, by far the most complex effect performed using a halo.
  • At the other end of the scale, Scheele has such fine control over her halo that she can use it to perform incredibly delicate surgery on living people.
• Realpolitik: Uber-capability is treated like nuclear capability: it confers such colossal military power that it is only shared extremely reluctantly.
  • The British are basically blackmailed into giving it to the Americans but neither gives it to the British dominions (Canada et al) or the French or the Italians, and the two only give it to the Soviets because they need to prevent them from collapsing.
  • To keep the Soviets from being too much of a threat the Anglo-Americans deliberately avoid telling them how to create the Woden's Blood catalyst, or about the existence and means of creating the more powerful Uber classes. The British later use the excuse of German raids on shipping to stop providing the Soviets with the catalyst.
  • The Germans do appear to tell the Japanese how to manufacture their own catalyst, but also don't tell them about the more powerful classes.
    • They later do tell the Japanese how to manufacture the more powerful classes, as they need the Japanese to help knock the Soviets out of the war.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Averted. Superpowers are used against ordinary humans on a massive scale, to gruesome effect. It's not clear if the Übers have any non-military applications, but the fact that disruption halos can transmute air into solid steel implies they could have some industrial utility...
• Replacement Goldfish: After the death of Hitler, the remaining Nazi leadership uses an Über geltmensch to replace him, in order to maintain morale. Later, this person is replaced by Goebbels, who has Über plastic surgery to change his appearance.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • Gruesomely demonstrated when one of the British Übers-under-construction decides to show off his super strength before he's become super durable: when he flexes his muscles they rip themselves right off his skeleton.
  • Patrick "Colossus" O'Connor is deployed to Paris before his battleship enhancement is complete. Thus, while he has the strength and disruption halo of a battleship, he doesn't have the full durability of one. The expected results occurs in bloody fashion when he faces the fully-enhanced Sieglinde.
• La Résistance: After Britain's capitulation to the Nazis, Stephanie and Turing continue their research in secret and keep on testing for Uber candidates. One such test is disrupted by a German patrol with a Uber just as Stephanie discovers a whole family of superhuman candidates, killing everyone but her and the youngest candidate. The Uber gets very close to killing her as well before several resistance fighters show up to distract him.
• The Reveal: Just as Hitler is celebrating Churchill's death, Siegmund reveals that he is not in fact Werner Frei, the hero of Kursk, but rather an (as yet unnamed) veteran of Stalingrad who blames Hitler for leading Germany to ruin. He melts Hitler's lips shut to stop him calling for help, then kills him in such a way as to make it look like a natural death.
• Revenge Before Reason: Surprisingly, Sieglinde refuses to surrender to the Russians and end the war as she refuses to forgive the Russians. Maria later chastises Sieglinde for continuing to serve the Nazis despite hating them.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Hitler and Nazi Germany's main strategy with the Übers in general amounts to this. After what the Reich suffered, they want to see Europe and the world burn, with themselves in charge.
• Rotating Protagonist: Perspective of the story always flips between characters from both Allied and the Nazi side.
• Running Gag:
  • Men refusing to use swear words with Leah Cohen present.
  • Whenever somebody's plans turn out incredibly badly for them, the narration describes them as irrelevant.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: It's mentioned that at least one "Miyoko" and a Japanese submarine crew decide not to return to Japan, possibly heading to Allied shores.
• Scenery Gorn: There is a lot of this.
  • The opening section set during the fall of Berlin, and then even more so when we see the results of Hitler unleashing Battleship Sieglinde on Paris and London.
  • The destruction cased by the Nazis' "Great Burn".
  • The results of the Nazis' invasion of America.
• See You in Hell: Siegmund (to Hitler): "After everything, I can't possibly believe in a god...but I still hope for a hell."
• Series Continuity Error: Minor example, but one panel in issue 17 of Invasion shows Siegmund with both arms.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: While the Allied super soldiers are dressed in practical combat fatiques, the Nazi "Ubers" take to the battlefield in tailored black leather suits; this is because they're important to the Nazi Propaganda Machine.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story: The comic might as well be renamed to this. Plenty of Allied attempts to counter the Nazis are given extensive setup, only to fail horrifically once they're actually put to the test. A special mention goes to both of the Colossus and Leah, whose transformations into superhumans are covered across multiple issues, only for them to end up crippled or straight up dead when they face the vastly superior Nazi superhumans for the first time (which the Nazi just develop off-screen).
• Shout-Out:
  • The cover of issue #3, pictured above, reenacts the famous car-trashing Superman cover of Action Comics #1 with a tank, complete with Allied soldiers fleeing in the background and the lower corner.
  • The pudgy, bespectacled, riding-crop-wielding British officer who fires on Sieglinde as she escapes from England bears a resemblance to Captain Mainwering. For bonus points this occurs in a small township ending in "-On-Sea".
  • The ending of Invasion #1 is a dark Shout Out to Independence Day.
  • The American Zephyr squads have red catsuits.
  • Yamato fatalistically comments "onwards towards our noble deaths" during the Japanese push into China, in a reference to Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Shigeru Mizuki's manga memoir of his experiences as a Japanese soldier in WWII.
• Shown Their Work: Gillen wrote a 25,000-word world bible. He notes he was so deep in research that at one point his German friends found him with a map of 1945 Berlin, a pile of Nazi biographies, World At War on TV, and listening to Richard Wagner.
• Slasher Smile: Siegfried/Markus always has one of these when he kills someone. Even when he made his first kill at the age of twelve.
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Zig-Zagged between realistic and fantastic. It's a realistic, carefully-researched portrayal of the bloody final days of World War 2... with armies of bulletproof superhumans.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: A very unambiguously cynical comic. The author went so far as to state that the comic is "not meant to be enjoyed."
• Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: An interesting example. Gillen has called Uber a "hard-mechanics" story, where the plot at its core is an if-this-happens-then-that-happens exercise in eldritch war technology development rather than a character-driven story. But there are a few well-defined characters who drive plot elements through their own desires and developments, notably Maria.
• Smug Super: Katyusha enjoys lording her greater powers over the Soviet government, as she at last has control over her life.
• The Sociopath: Hitler and Markus. The latter slaughters thousands of unarmed POWs with his powers on the former's orders. Sieglinde even refers to Markus as "the little sadist"; he's the only Über who clearly and shamelessly enjoys his work.
• Sophisticated as Hell: As in real life, General Patton combines precision eloquence with the foulest language imaginable, often in the same sentence.
  Patton: I'd despise the Hun for [cutting off your leg], even if it wasn't my God-given mission to destroy them. They're a collection of dangling strands of anal hair, if I may say so, ma'am.
  Leah: Thank you. I think.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: The result of Zephyrs overexerting themselves.
• Spotting the Thread: Stephanie realizes that her Tank-Man bodyguard she just seduced sweated after sex. Since they shouldn't perspire after that level of exertion, she realizes that he's a German Geltmensch spy, and immediately fetches a pistol.
• The Stoic:
  • General Sankt is cold, cynical, brilliant and almost totally emotionless. Klaudia/Sieglinde says that "he never managed a particularly convincing impression of a human." Even when facing death, he simply spits out several calm insults at Hitler before having his face melted by Markus/Siegfried.
  • Churchill similarly faces his death at Sieglinde's hands with a stiff upper lip.
• Strong and Skilled: Siegmund is the V1 Battleship most skilled with his Halo Effect, as he practices with it by sculpting when he is off-duty. It turns out this is so he can precisely warp Hitler's flesh.
• Stupid Evil: After being granted the last minute lifeline the Über project provided Hitler continued making the kind of questionable decisions he had for at least the previous two years. It didn't help that he was on meth, among other things.
  • He had hundreds of thousands more Soviet POW killed, this time directly rather than through starvation or overwork like the previous 3 million. In 1945 Germans were well aware that the Soviets had a net calorie deficit only negated by a constant stream of imported milk products and meat... and 1.5 million German POW. Speer immediately vomits and cries when it happens.
  • He has Sankt, the man who spearheaded the entire project and probably the biggest asset he ever had, executed for not allowing him to waste the supersoldiers by spreading them too thin or using them too early.
  • He sent one of his three most powerful supersoldiers (Sieglinde) on a pointless and possibly suicidal attack on London which resulted in little more than Monumental Damage and a dead Churchill, something even he (Churchill) dismisses as just another "old fart".
  • He spent two issues throwing insult after insult at an evidently angry Siegmund for retreating in battle, despite the latter having been overwhelmed by nearly a hundred Soviet Übers. Siegmund actually kills him, though this was already planned long in advance.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: This series was written as a deconstruction of shallower works suggesting that World War II with superheroes and mad science would have been awesome; rather, the Nazis having super weapons or super soldiers is a very bad thing. Having said Stupid Jetpack Science at his disposal also ends VERY poorly for Hitler. He is assassinated by Siegmund, who blames Hitler's mismanagement of the war for the death of his fellow soldiers.
• Suicide Attack:
  • Some Allied soldiers try to kill Übers by throwing themselves at them while covered in live grenades (it doesn't work). Later, the Japanese "Miyoko" superhumans are sent on deliberate suicide missions to destroy American warships. One Miyoko, who says that he "earnestly desires" to carry out a kamikaze attack, allows himself to keep fighting until exhaustion makes his powers overload fatally.
  • The Soviet Union sends 90 newly-minted Tank class Ubers to Kursk against Battleship Siegmund, despite all evidence suggesting that they won't even break his skin. They manage to sever an arm and force his retreat, but 81 of the original 90 are either killed or severely injured.
  • Sieglinde is launched on a V2 rocket to attack London and assassinate Churchill. None of the Germans, including Sieglinde herself, expect her to survive – she's just required to cause as much devastation as possible before the Allies overwhelm her.
  • Leah Cohen is an aversion; she is almost sent in to counter Sieglinde, despite her superpowers being incomplete. Churchill orders her to hold back in order to avoid a repeat of Colossus' pointless death, despite knowing that this will cost him his life.
• Superhero Horror: Given the extreme gore and deeply cynical and disturbing plot.
• Superhero Speciation:
  • Both the Allies and Axis begin deploying teams of Tank-class Ubers with a mix of power-sets: Heavy (physical activation), Blitzmensch (halo activation) and the original V2, or Panzermensch (a mixture of both). Each type has an advantage against another, and the use of all three covers each other's weaknesses.
  • Averted among the German battleships. All are V1 Battleships because they were created before the Heavy and Blitzmensch methods were discovered.
  • More exotic alternatives to physical and halo effects are later discovered: Geltmensch impersonators and Zephyr speeders.* Super-Soldier: The Übers, superpowered soldiers that handily alter the course of World War 2 and irrevocably change the makeup of modern warfare.
• Superpower Lottery:
  • Only 1 in 5,000 humans can be enhanced safely, and even fewer can be transformed into "battleship" Übers. Only a handful of characters have been capable of reaching "battleship" level – Siegfried, Sieglinde, Siegmund, Colossus, Razor, Maria, Leah Cohen, Vernon and Freddie Rivers, Hideki and Tamara.
  • Leah Cohen becomes physically stronger than any of the V1 battleship-class Übers when her transformation is complete. Unfortunately, the process leaves her severely deformed, with a normal-sized head atop a massive hunchbacked body.
  • Maria possesses the strongest halo effect in the world, as she is a Battleship level Blitzmensch. She manages to effortlessly defeat Sieglinde, cementing her as potentially the most powerful Über in the world until someone develops a tactic or powers to counter her.
• Superpower Meltdown: Possible if a Tank-class Über is shot in the eye as he is charging his Eye Beams; Siegfried's explosion is correspondingly larger when his eye is cut open. Übers can also spontaneously explode if they use their disruption halos for too long without rest.
• Superpower Russian Roulette:
  • An unusually literal example. Desperate to forestall any further German advances into Soviet territory, Stalin forces every one of the 420,000 soldiers who fled from the Ubers to take Woden's Blood without testing them. This empowers just a hundred and kills the rest. This was not a radical departure from pre-Uber policy, under which they would have been assigned to Penal Units. These were used exclusively in the casualty-heavy 'Assault' phase of offensive operations to crack enemy tactical defenses.
  • In Invasion, the development of the "Zephyrs" leads to several horrible deaths as it turns out that the only way to stop them from overstraining their bodies before they toughen up enough to withstand the demands of super-speed is to keep them heavily sedated throughout the activation process.
• Super-Speed:
  • Leah Cohen is the fastest character in the series, capable of running 200mph even in pain and before being completely enhanced. Sieglinde and HMH Dunkirk also exhibit similar capabilities, but theoretically would be slower than a fully-activated Leah.
  • The fourth major type of über, the "Zephyr" introduced in Invasion, move so fast that time seems to stand still as they suddenly appear from over the horizon. However, their incredible speed comes with major limitations, which General Patton outlines when he meets one: they can't interact with anything other than enhanced human flesh (so they can't build tanks or dig latrines in a fraction of the time), they require a full day's rest after activating (so they can only be used sparingly), and most crucially, they only activate for approximately two minutes at a time (which feels subjectively like two weeks to them). So they can murder any enhanced soldiers within a few hundred meters of their starting point, but are then completely helpless for the next 24 hours. Patton is unimpressed when he discovers all this.
• Super-Strength: Every enhanced human that we have seen so far has this power to some degree. The "tank" Übers are strong enough to punch through walls and dismember normal humans; the "battleships" can casually fling actual tanks around. Leah Cohen is the strongest of all, and at full power should be able to tear "normal" Battleships apart with her bare hands; during tests, she throws a tank twenty miles when she tries her hardest.
• Super-Toughness: After a few physical enhancements an Über can easily withstand bullets. Battleships can endure naval shell bombardments. Leah Cohen seems nigh-invulnerable, requiring a focused application of the halo effect for several minutes to even break her skin; she's dropped several miles from a plane with no parachute, and survives without a scratch. Siegmund survives an atomic bomb at point-blank range—though from the degree of mutilation he appears to suffer, he probably wishes he hadn't.
• Surgical Impersonation: Josef Goebbels has the Über surgeon Anita Scheele use her disruption halo to reshape his features into Hitler's, to provide a permanent replacement after Hitler's death, as Geltmenschen can't appear on film.
• Special Person, Normal Name: HMH Dunkirk is introduced as the first British Destroyer-class, a mystery to his comrades and capable of wiping out an entire outpost of German Ubers on his own. His real name is Howard.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: With enough power and control, the halo effect can shape and transform material, allowing transubstantiation, sculpture etc.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors:
  • The different classes of Übers balance one another out to some degree. The agile Panzermensch can quickly destroy the frail Blitzmensch; the super-strong Heavies make mincemeat of Panzermensch; and the Blitzmensch's long-range power allows them to easily counter the Heavies. For a large part of the series, the Allied forces lacked the ability to make Blitzmensch, leaving them with only two parts of the necessary triangle, and thus at a significant disadvantage to the German forces.
  • Of course, Battleship Übers can annihilate all the lesser classes with ease, cutting through any deadlock.
  • A similar trinity is expected between standard battleships and specialised specimens like Leah Cohen and Katyusha. Katyusha Maria, a Blitz-type Battleship, easily defeats the Panzer-type Sieglinde, which upsets the equation. However, this is complicated by Maria's unique nature; her strength and durability are also enhanced, which suggests she is not a pure Blitzmensch. Furthermore, her blood test's spectacular result implies that her halo is vastly more powerful than a normal Battleship, making her the most powerful Über in the series.
  • The equation is no longer as simple, due to a combination of tactics and activation stacking. Leah Cohen had trouble defeating two Cruisers armed with 4 physical and 8 halo activations, as they were fast enough to evade her attacks while wearing her down with powerful halo blasts.
• Taken for Granite: Stalin is transformed into a Woden's Blood statue by Maria.
• Take That!: After ordering Scheele to be mutilated, Albert Speer reassures himself that he's "the good one", alluding to his highly questionable post-war claims to have been the Token Good Nazi.
• Taking You with Me: It is repeatedly stated that the Nazis have no chance of actually winning the war, having suffered so much economic damage before the Übers emerged. Nonetheless, the sheer power of the Übers and their rapid proliferation among the warring nations ensures that the war will escalate to even more catastrophic proportions. Hitler himself all but admits that he wants the Allies to suffer more than what they made Germany suffer. Sieglinde lampshades this, saying that it is too late for Germany to win the war, but at least they can make sure everyone loses.
• Tanks for Nothing: The "tank" Übers cut through actual tanks with ease, and the "battleships" can shrug off direct hits from tank shells without even flinching.
• Taught by Experience: Siegmund is shown to be a drastically more effective fighter than the braggart Siegfried, as he's fought in multiple fronts, while Siegfried is a 14-year-old glorified pet and executioner for most of the war.
• Telepathy:
  • It's theorized that Geltmensch powers are telepathic in nature, since their actual physical appearance doesn't change.
  • Maria seems to be showing signs of psychic powers. One character compliments her on her excellent English, only for her to claim that she doesn't speak English (though this could just be her weird sense of humor). Even stranger, she knows Hideki's real name without being told it.
• There Is Another: Patrick O'Connor aka H.M.H. Colossus has a brother, Eamonn "Razor" O'Connor. He eventually becomes a battleship: Colossus II.
• Throw-Away Country: The Germans destroy the whole of Belgium as the first stage of their "Great Burn".
• Training from Hell:
  • Parodied when Maria sternly orders her training candidates to do press-ups, then admits that she's just messing with them.
  • Then played straight when it turns out that the only way that Maria can think of to teach her students how to produce catalyst is to put them through what she went through.
• Two-Faced:
  • Sieglinde after her fight against Katyusha.
  • Siegfried in the final moments of his life, after a Zephyr cuts his eye open as he uses his halo power. Notable for half his head being not just disfigured, but missing.
• Übermensch: Surprisingly averted. Despite their power, the Übers generally tend to obey orders and maintain their pre-enhancement moral codes. Katyusha goes rogue and Siegmund turns against Hitler, but these acts are entirely consistent with their behavior prior to enhancement.
• Understatement: The constant visceral horror of the series' events intentionally contrasts with their dry narration. One can see a whole platoon being slaughtered in an instant, described as "at which point, the Allied forces encountered a complication."
• Unreliable Narrator: Stephanie seems to change the story of her "first memory" every time she tells it. However, it's actually a case of Exact Words: to one person she tells her "earliest memory" (the moment from earliest in her life she remembers), to another her "first memory" (the first memory of her new life as a spy), and to another her "first memory every morning" (a particularly horrific moment from her undercover work that haunts her every time she wakes up).
• Unskilled, but Strong:
  • Siegfried. While Siegmund and Sieglinde are capable of more delicate use of their Halo Effect, Siegfried is only ever seen using his brutally against straightforward problems and weaker opponents.
  • Leah Cohen has no halo effect, but theoretically is strong and durable enough that it should not matter.
• Uriah Gambit: The Americans deliberately send Siegmund into Tokyo first, because they suspect, rightly, that the Japanese have the failed nuke the Americans dropped on them and will use it as a booby-trap for any superpowered attacker. Partly because they simply view him as more expendable than their own Übers, but also to avoid the public outrage at a Nazi who participated in massacres of American civilians, and who is also gay getting away with it.
• Villainous Valour: Goebbels willingly has himself become a doppelganger for Hitler after his assassination. Ironically proving himself more sane than Hitler ever was.
• Walking Spoiler: Siegmund is not the man he was believed to be, and has been planning to assassinate Hitler from the start.
• War Is Hell: Takes place in an Alternate History World War II where Nazi Germany was able to create superhuman soldiers during the last days of the war. Though they are able to save the Nazis' from the brink of defeat during the Battle of Berlin, the most destructive conflict in human history soon turns even worse, as the Allies gain the ability to create their own Ubers which escalates the fighting to even more catastrophic proportions. A German general goes as far as committing suicide when he realizes the Ubers will only prolong the war and even more people will die as result. To cap it all off, its stated that its too late for the Nazis to win (as they were left too debilitated following the fighting), but at least they can make sure everyone else loses.
• Was Once a Man:
  • The appearances of the new heavy-class Übers are a shock to the scientists who develop them. Glimpses through their armor show normal human body proportions, scaled up to ridiculous size and incredibly muscled. The "heavy battleship" Leah Cohen, on the other hand, looks like a monstrous cross between a giant pink gorilla and Popeye. What makes this especially tragic is that she was warned of the possible deformities, but decided to proceed with the transformation in order to bring the Nazis to justice for their atrocities.
  • A flashback reveals that Battleship Zero, the first attempt at activating a Battleship-potential human, looked even worse. It is so misshapen that its original sex is impossible to determine. Massive legless slug-like body bursting with huge tumor-like growths, sword-like claws, and a face that looks like it has partially melted down into its neck. At least Leah Cohen is still humanoid and symmetrical. Zero looks like the unholy love child of Jabba the Hutt and a Resident Evil 3: Nemesis Tyrant.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Battleship-class disruption halos can be this. When Sieglinde attacks London, her halo creates an explosion that looks to be about a thousand feet across, instantly demolishing Downing Street. Katyusha's deployment at Kursk is even more spectacular, with a single blast reducing several city blocks to a crater of glass, wiping out a German army group in the process.
• Weak, but Skilled: Anita Scheele, Sankt's assistant, is nothing more than a standard tank-class. But her familiarity with the Über program and opportunity to safely practice has given her the greatest halo effect control seen so far, allowing her to perform plastic surgery with her power.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Heavy Übers turn out to have relatively weak knee joints, to the point where they are rendered utterly helpless if their knees are knocked out. It still requires the strength of another Heavy to destroy their joints, however.
• We Have Reserves: With the Germans back in central Ukraine, and every expectation that they will attempt to finish their work there (they razed everything west of eastern Ukraine on their way out), Stalin takes this approach to developing superhumans. We don't have time to test hundreds of soldiers to see which of them is capable of adjusting to super-serum! Just give it to all of the soldiers that surrendered at Berlin, and would otherwise be assigned to the now-obsolete 'Penal Battalions', and if we're lucky we'll get enough Übers to save the Ukrainian people - even if 4,999 out of every 5,000 die after instantly spraying blood from all their orifices.
• Weird Historical War: Played for Drama and Played for Horror.
• Wham Episode:
  • Issue #11, without a doubt. Both Winston Churchill and Hitler have been killed by Sieglinde and Siegmund, respectively.
  • Issue #17 does it, too. After meeting with Montgomery in a hotel room, Stephanie informs him that she believes that the Nazis have created an Über designed to be the perfect field agent after determining that the German's are copying her research. As a result, any Übers that the Allies have made can now be made by the Axis. As if that's not enough, Montgomery unveils an entirely new revelation explained by the presence of super-spies.
  Montgomery: The atomic bomb, girl. It'll explain what happened to the atomic bomb.
  • Issue #26 shows the Nazis deploying what they think is a fourth Battleship-class Uber, allowing them to win the Battle of Calais and disable the Heavy Battleship Leah Cohen.
  • Issue #27 delivers in a shocking season 1 finale. It's revealed that the "Siegmund" and "Sieglinde" operating during the Battle of Calais and throughout the Great Burn were just disguised Nazi Cruiser-class Ubers. The "fourth" Nazi Battleship at Calais was the real Sieglinde, whose fight against Katyusha has left her unable to walk, but with her Battleship-class halo effect still intact. This was all part of an even grander ploy, with the further revelation that Siegmund and Siegfried have led a considerable force of Ubers by submarine in an invasion of the United States of America.
  • The first issue in Uber: Invasion is a follow up to the above event and is a massive bombshell. The Nazi invasion attacks Washington D.C. and President Truman is vaporized along with the entire White House in the assault.
  • Uber Invasion #7 drops a massive one with the first ever Nazi Battleship fatality in the series: Siegfried.
  • Uber Invasion #11: The German Invasion force is defeated and Siegmund surrenders to the allies.
  • Uber Invasion #15: Despite being crippled HMS Churchill is able to easily dispatch Battleship Zero allowing Katyusha Maria to halt the advances of both the Nazis and the Japanese Battleships (But not seriously injure them). But Maria is betrayed by Stalin and apparently murdered by her students.
  • Uber Invasion #16: Maria is revealed to have survived the attempt on her life and retaliates by murdering Stalin and disintegrating the Soviet Union singlehandedly. Her actions accelerate the Allies' plan to attack Japan directly by dropping Siegmund into Tokyo.
• Wham Line:
  Siegmund: "I wasn't at the first battle of Kursk. I don't know who this Werner man was, but he isn't me."
  • The first line from Uber Invasion 005 counts, given the chain of Nazi victories preceding it;
  There was a considerable material cost for the Germans' victory at Naugatuck.
  • From Uber Invasion 011:
  Siegmund: "Defect. Want Defect."
  • From Uber Invasion 013, after Yamato digs a massive chasm through China to guard the flank of the Japanese invasion of the eastern USSR.
  No one could have predicted that the events it precipitated would be one of the primary causes leading to the Soviet removal from the war.
• Wham Shot: When we first see the bust of Siegfried in issue 12 of Invasion, the year of their birth is obscured, and we get to read their mother talking a little bit about what they were like as a child and suddenly a lot of their character makes sense. Then we see the year of birth unobscured, and it all makes sense - they were still just a child, one who had been fed stories of the "glory" of war by their delusional mother and then given the power of a god.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: A minor subplot early in the first issue – the efforts of a group of Berlin survivors to surrender to the Soviets – ends abruptly once Sieglinde opens fire. Perhaps the survivors all died in the onslaught; they're never seen or mentioned again.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Leah's ability to jump from a plane without a parachute and act as a kinetic weapon is a big part of her proposed tactics. Unfortunately, she's afraid of heights.
• Wild Card: Katyusha becomes this due to her hatred of Stalin and being abused by the Soviet military, first for retreating against orders, and then for apparently being a "failed" Über. Weeks later, she escapes her gulag after suddenly unleashing a massive disruption halo explosion, and displaying what seems to be the spontaneous generation of Woden's Blood. This alone makes her one of the most important players in the new war.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea:
  • After assuming his identity, Goebbels notes that Hitler is more useful as an idea than a leader.
  • The idea behind HMH Colossus proved to be too great for the Allies to leave dead.
  • This contributes to making things worse, as Goebbels points out, they can destroy industry, but if even one person escapes with the knowledge of how to make the catalyst, there's the potential for an enemy Battleship to emerge and wreck a whole lot of havoc years later.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The moment when General Sankt discovers that he's just another Decoy Protagonist.
• Your Head A-Splode: Übers who use their disruption halos for too long without rest risk a gory cranium-splitting self-destruct. Rudolph Gelt suffers this when Stephanie shoots him through the eyeball.
• Your Size May Vary: Very noticeable due to the Art Evolution from artist to artist. Initially, the Tank Ubers are shown as being towering giants that dwarf ordinary humans, while the Battleships are even more gigantic, and the Heavies are colossal monsters as big as actual tanks. However, later issues make the Tank Ubers somewhat smaller, and the size mismatch between Tanks and Heavies seems to change a lot from issue to issue.
• Youthful Freckles: Eamonn "Razor" O'Conner (aka, USS Colossus) is described as not even being old enough to drink (18-20). He's got a smattering of freckles to emphasize his youth and relative innocence.

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Win? No, it's too late for that. We can't ever win. We can just ensure everybody loses.

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