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pomegranate-salad · 8 years

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ÜbeR-rated

For whatever reason, Word War 2 and Nazism have been on my mind a lot lately, so I finally got around to reading Über, all 27 issues of it, plus the specials and the beginning of Über Invasion. And I wrote a 5K analysis of it in the context of the fictionalization of Nazis. This is a thing I did to myself. And if you don’t want to feel left out, now you can read it too.

Heavy spoilers for the whole Über run, TW for pretty much everything you’d expect from a WW2 comic (except screenshots, because… well). Enjoy (?)

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What am I looking at here ?

It’s 11 pm here and I’ve been staring blankly at my computer screen for thirty minutes, trying to find the proper way to kick off this essay, when all I had to do was to take a look at the additional rewards of the Kickstarter for the new Über arc, in order to introduce the point I want to start this piece on : I AM VERY, VERY WARY OF WW2-BASED FICTION. It’s not to say I’m opposed to it on principle, as I know some people are ; no matter how hard the topic, there’s always use for fiction. Fiction is a vector. It can be used right and it can be used wrong, but while on some levels it cannot hope to ever hold the same value as historical content, there are similarly elements only a piece of fiction can grasp. And if this kind of ethical discussion is always going to be around, it’s because fictionalization of real-life events is always going to be around. It’s an inevitable processing device of the human mind, and as much as possible I try to examine artistic material without resting my entire appreciation on their rapport to their source material, if only because part of their value comes from their ability to stray away from it.

But if there’s one event around which the tensions between history and fiction have made themselves an integrant and even a central part of any discussion of their artistic merits, it would be World War Two, and more specifically the Third Reich aspect of it. Maybe that’s unfair. But the historicity that has to be worked with on other topics here becomes a prerequisite concern : if the transposition from real events to fiction is handled poorly, it stands at risk of disqualifying the entire work. And even in works from thoughtful, ethically-minded creators (as it is the case with Über) you’re never safe from a “what the hell were they thinking” type of blunder. I hope they still sell those shirts next time I visit an Avatar booth so I finally get something to go with my “I <3 Auschwitz” tote bag.

However, once we get past the fact that the “offensiveness” of the work is always going to be part of the discussion, there is a lot to be said on the link between historical events and their fictionalization on a pure narrative level. Even when this fictionalization is done wrong from an ethical point of view, it can teach us a lot about our own need for fiction and the inner workings of real events-based artworks.

I felt this introduction was necessary, as this piece is going to feature both discussions of the ethical stakes raised by the choices Über made when fictionalizing WW2, and discussions of the same choices from a storytelling and aesthetic perspective. Nevertheless, even when these two aspects – ethical and artistic – are discussed separately, it should be understood that they are coexisting lenses of appreciation of Über as a whole, and that a negative or positive appreciation of a narrative choice from one perspective should in no way be taken as a validation or denigration from the other. To put it simply, the fact that I will praise some of Über’s creative decisions doesn’t mean I consider them free of ethical issues ; reciprocally, my criticism of Über’s handling of some ethical issues doesn’t mean I consider it worthless as a piece of art.

If you are of the opinion that ethical deficiency should prevent any artistic analysis of this work to take place, I will not argue ; similarly, if you want to avail yourself of a right to enjoy fiction without concerning yourself with ethical debates – well, you’re wrong, but that’s not an argument I will start here. Personally, I think these two aspects need to be analysed concurrently here, as Über is kind of a perfect case study in WW2 fictionalization in that it’s a thought-provoking work in large part because it is riddled with questionable choices, instead of being thought-provoking in spite of them.

In conclusion to this introduction folks, Über is a land of contrasts.

The Three Big Bad Wolves

At its most basic level, the premise of Über is nothing that hasn’t been done before : at some point in WW2, we enter an alternate timeline in which Nazis somehow manage to take the advantage thanks to a technical breakthrough. It’s a handy premise as it has long served as an oblique way to discuss the American use of the atom bomb in Japan, and the subsequent nuclear race, without being hit with the “would you rather have had the Nazis win the war ?” inevitable defence. Put the dangerous toy in the hands of the most recognizable villainous figure of the 20th century, and suddenly, the conversion loses its controversial aspect. However, I’d also argue it loses its pertinence. It doesn’t have to, but more often than not, the identification of debatable means to an undebatable villain tends to wash out any reflexion on the mean itself to instead reinforce the evil of the character. The Nazi atom bomb is evil because it’s Nazi, not because it’s a weapon of mass destruction. There’s no equivalent to the nuclear escalation started by the US bomb in the Nazi atom bomb timeline : any technological progress made to counter Nazis is ultimately being coloured as good, because it’s fighting Nazis we’re talking about.

This is where Über does something interesting : instead of trying for a weak “no blameless sides” approach that could only pale in comparison with the culturally engrained goal of stopping Nazis, it turns the original premise to eleven and watches it unfold. The Nazi atom bomb is not just the American one with the eagle painted black, it’s one that dons an unmistakably Nazi idea : the rise of a superior race of men. So when the USSR and the UK and then the US have to retaliate, they have to do so by implementing a technology that is tainted with the very ideology they are fighting against. In that sense, it’s very telling that we see this technology collide with the Allies’ own racist ideology : America is willing to put itself at a disadvantage by under-employing some of its potential “enhanced men” because they are black. In the war of ideas presented in Über, Germany has already won : it’s now fighting on its own field.

That’s the enhanced men premise in terms of sides ; what about the enhanced men on their own ? Where do they stand in the context of fictionalizing WW2 ? There’s of course an inevitable comparison to be made between Captain America and Über, but one I will leave to someone who actually knows their stuff about Captain America. Instead, I want to look at this premise from a larger perspective : is there a use for a superior version of Nazis ? A sci-fi device is handy to compensate for an overpowered adversary ; in Über’s case in particular, any modern WW2-based fiction has to work with the limitations of hindsight : we live in a world that was built on a Nazi defeat, therefore it is hard to conceive of a winning Germany without somehow rebalancing the odds. This is where fiction might benefit from a re-actualization that is inherently impossible for historical material : we could make Nazis win, so we can beat them again.

However, this is where the unicity of WW2 as an historical event comes to undercut the use of fiction. WW2 and the Holocaust aren’t just real events : they were a cultural breaking point. To grossly paraphrase Theodor Adorno, one cannot think in the paradigm that led to Auschwitz anymore. With the end of WW2, a page of the human book of thoughts was turned. Our intellect, our culture, came across something that couldn’t be assimilated : both had to be profoundly rerouted to make sense of the world. Nazism is an intellectual dead-end : it represent the moment an entire intellectual and cultural paradigm imploded into total loss of meaning. What it means is that, even today, Nazism is Nazism precisely because we can’t conceive of it, and yet it did come to exist. Understanding the historicity of Nazism takes more than faith in the facts ; it takes suspension of disbelief IRL. The key factor in understanding the cultural impact of WW2 is its reality. Nazis aren’t scary because they were evil, they are scary because they were real. So if your premise is something along the lines of “Nazis, but scarier”, all you can accomplish is further remove Nazism from what gives it its cultural impact and straight into fiction territory. By pushing it into deliberate incredibility instead of forcing the audience to confront its actual incredibility, you anchor your story into a sanitized environment in which Nazism has been replaced by its cultural shorthand. Your Nazi is evil, but they’re not real, and therefore not scary.

This is why to me, using fictional enhancement to compensate for the historicity of Nazism is a device that is doomed from the start. This is a case where Reality wins ; even the slightest confrontation to real-life Nazi brutality has more narrative impact than all the sci-fi body horror in the world. What it meant for me reading Über is that I was aware of the impact the übermensch were supposed to have on the reader but I never felt this impact for myself. I’d argue the scariest moment in the whole Über run occurs in the Special, specifically Markus’ backstory. Here we see a child born into national-socialist ideology commit a hate crime. The implacable use of infantile impulses to indoctrinate hatred ; now this is a taste of the unbelievable Reality of Nazism. In comparison, Klaudia destroying all of Paris elicits no emotion because it belongs wholly in the cogs of fiction.

Now this would be alright if Über’s only ambition was to tell a story set in the context of WW2, but it’s a comic with the ambition to make a statement about WW2, meaning it wants me to be invested both in its actual story and in the fact that it’s a WW2 story. But it doesn’t work as a standalone story because its stakes are so rooted in its historical basis, and it cannot hope to one-up this basis as a work of fiction. As a result, Über sits uncomfortably between its premise and its stakes, lowering the latter by furthering the former.

Killing cities in a night, repeatedly

The fictionalized and historical aspects of Über also come to collide in its graphic decisions. Violence – both its level and its regularity – is a recurrent issue encountered by WW2-based works, including non-fiction ones : what to show ? How much to show ? This is a matter of responsibility but also impact : setting a standard of violence is also what will help you to highlight and judge these actions relatively. What kind of violence do the “good guys” allow themselves ? What is the line that indicates a wrongdoing ?

WW2 here comes with its specific set of problems, as it is an era in which brutality and barbarism wasn’t only pushed further than ever before, it was also generalized and systematized ; meaning that violence can virtually be present at every instant and not feel like an exaggeration. Moreover, there is such a variety of ways this violence can be painted, from clinical and cold to outrageous and unbearable, that each representation of violence cannot help but feel like a statement.

Every WW2-based work has provided us with its own answer to this problem. In Merle’s Death is my trade, the violence of Auschwitz is perceived through the eyes of a detached, efficiency-minded SS top officer : here, violence is a numbing succession of technical examination, the result of a cost and benefits analysis devoid of any empathy. In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino went in the opposite direction : this is one of his least violent films from a frequency perspective, but when violence occurs, it is never anodyne. Sometimes it is glorious, other times gruesome, but the movie makes sure you are there to appreciate every single bit of it.

So safe to say there are many ways the litany of horrors of WW2 can be approached. But the solution Über came up with is in my sense a particularly creative, meaningful one, and one I can’t recall ever seeing before. Violence is Über is ever-present, ever-extreme, and yet somehow always centred. Generally, representing violence in WW2-based work takes the form of an arbitration between frequency and impact. You either use violence to world-building purposes in order to create an ever-brutal environment, or you save it to put emphasis on a couple of significant moments. But in this debate of violence as a beat versus violence as a drop, Über never really takes position. Every other panel features someone being ripped apart, some mash of flesh on the ground, every confrontation brings its lot of snuff visuals. It should be numbing or acclimating, but we are forced to keep paying attention by the constant spot the story shines on it. Violence in Über is both the stage and the play ; even when it has relatively little effect on you – as it is my case – you are always half-forced to integrate it and half-forced to focus on it.

But even more interestingly, if everything is violence, then it means there is no background or forefront violence. A plot-wise insignificant rape of a nameless character in the first issue is depicted with the exact same crudeness as HMH Churchill’s leg ripping off during the most decisive battle of the first arc. No violent act is either meaningless or meaningful. No violent act is ever narratively highlighted, therefore no violent act is ever justified. I’ve often read that Über “doesn’t pick sides”, but it definitely does ; what it doesn’t pick is a demarcating line. Violence is the great equalizer of Über : brutality is brutality, whether it’s kicking a puppy or winning a war. This is a courageous position because it goes beyond the “all sides are bad” easy rhetoric of most Manichean WW2 narratives. The violence in Über is not a rhetorical tool, it is not up for discussion, it resists both analysis and relativizing. It is a whole that cannot be picked apart and deconstructed. This is a very punk rock use of violence in that it says almost nothing but makes it emptiness meaningful.

[I can’t help, however, but point to the only narrative decision so far I consider unequivocally wrong : to wait until the story takes place in the US in Invasion to dedicate some consequent space and speaking time to casualties and civilians. I know where this decision comes from – render the stakes of a Nazi invasion more personal to an historically untouched America – but the fact that this is the first time this aspect of war is evoked on its own feels not only like a gross erasure of actual history, it perpetuates the long Hollywoodian tradition of only being able to care about things when they happen to good US citizen. Somehow I feel like if millions of people can march around the world in preventive solidarity with the US, any member of the presumed Anglo-Saxon readership should be able to grasp at the horror of devastated Europe and Asia without being able to spell the last name of the victims. Anyway, Über Invasion #2 is a perfect example of how a good standalone chapter can lose all of its compelling power when taken in the context of its own series. Back to the essay.]

The Jewish Question

yup and I’m sure this header will never bring in my notifications the delightful people who frantically search it on every website

Because violence is an equalizer in Über, it means everything that’s represented in the comics stands at the same level of horror as everything else. What this entails is that, if there is something the authors do consider reaching a superior level of horror, this superiority cannot be expressed within the pages ; there is no way to double down on ultraviolence. Therefore, the only solution to do this particular act justice is to leave it out. There are no degrees of violence, only representation or lack thereof. And this is a determining factor Über uses extensively.

Despite being described in virtually review as “uncompromising”, I find Über to be on the contrary built on compromise ; only the compromising happens before anything makes it onto the page. Because of its particular subject matter, it gives ethical significance to anything “making the cut”, which reveals a level of thoughtfulness of the creators that I wish I could see more often around difficult material.

And maybe with no surprise, there is one thing Über is decidedly not showing. I call Über a WW2 comic, a Nazism comic, but it is not, by any means, a Holocaust comic. You could count on one hand the number of times the camps are mentioned ; we witness but two acts of antisemitism, and that’s if we include the special ; of the two featured queer characters, one is a Nazi ; there is no Rromani character ; and if not for Leah Cohen, the comic would be entirely devoid of named Jewish characters. Really, this is such a glaring hole in the comic’s narrative fabric that it cannot be something other than intentional. The comic twists into at times frankly comical contortions to avoid the subject : the Nazis are experimenting on humans, but they’re mostly non-Jewish Slavs. Bloody doctor Mengele shows up and he doesn’t do a goddamn thing.

So I think the intentionality is pretty clear here. Now I’ve said in my Tara piece that I will always respect a creator’s decision to stay away from a topic if they don’t see themselves having the legitimacy or the shoulders to handle it properly. It’s especially true when this decision was made out of respect for that topic, which I believe was the case here. I do see why one would want to avoid discussing the Holocaust in their comic about human nuclear bomb Nazis wiping off most of Europe.

However justified – and possibly right – this choice was, it begs a different question regardless : can you make a comic about WW2, and one exploring literal Nazi doctrine at that, that mostly ignores the Holocaust ? Well obviously you can, but can you make this work meaningful while cutting out the most central and recognizable aspect of WW2 ?

Let’s say it straight up : I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think an abstract answer can even be given here. But we can look at the answer Über gives us.

On a pure narrative level, Über does evacuate most of the problem by situating its story after the liberation of the camps. I’d argue that given what a pressing matter the imminent discovery of the camps by the Allies was to losing Germany (google “death march” next time you feel like your life is going too well), it’s hard to conceive why Sankt didn't just take one of the battleships for a stroll to the camps and have them literally blink every evidence out of existence, but let’s accept there are in-universe reasons why the topic can be cautiously worked around.

On a conceptual level, things are more complicated. Über is a comic about WW2, but one that explicitly focuses on Nazis and Nazi ideology. It’s natural for a work about Pearl Harbour not to peep a word of the Holocaust. But when the foundation of the comic rests on Nazi soldiers and the people directly fighting them, the absence of the Holocaust aspect feels like there’s something missing. As a thought experiment, I tried to imagine if the comic would have worked if it had taken place in WWI instead. The protagonists are similar, so are, roughly, the battlefields. There is virtually no reason why WWI Germany wouldn’t work as an antagonist in a sci-fi comic. In fact I’m pretty sure there’s at least one comic out there with this scenario. And yet it feels like Über wouldn’t work at all in WWI. As a second thought experiment, I wondered if the premise would have worked if the Allies had come up with the enhanced human first and realized I’d invented Captain America.

In both instances, the transposition doesn’t work, because of one reason : Nazis. As I said earlier, there is something irreplaceable in the combination of Nazi characters and Nazi ideology-based sci-fi. Über doesn’t work as simply “a war comic in which one side gets enhancing technology” because its core relies way too much on our shared understanding and approach to Nazis. And this is where the absence of a Holocaust narrative in the plot can deprive it of meaning. Nazism is Nazism and not Any Other Nationalist ideology because of the Holocaust. The world we live in today is built on the identity between Nazism and the Holocaust. You cannot think of one without thinking of the other. So when Über rests its premise on Nazism while consciously avoiding discussing the Holocaust, it’s effectively using Nazis out of their context and into a made-up one. It borrows the cultural significance of Nazism while cutting out its signifier.

This leads to a bizarre situation in which only two of the Nazis featured in Hitler are ever seen partaking in Nazi ideology, and the people who are actually seen torturing an – albeit willing – Jewish character are British. A situation in which the entire core of the racist Nazi ideology feels like a bygone idea destined to die with an insane Hitler to make room for tacticians and economists.

To reiterate, I don’t know if leaving the Holocaust out was the wrong decision or not. Maybe the risk of feeling exploitative was too great and the creative team was wise to leave it out as much as possible. But as a result, it can’t help but lean a bit more on erasure. The fact is that when your mean of respecting something is to leave it out, then you won’t have the opportunity to compensate for whatever opposite content does make it in the comic. There is nothing offensive about the Holocaust in Über, but there’s nothing reverent about it either.

Prisoners of fate

In fact, there’s not much reverence for anything inside Über. There is respect as I’ve discussed earlier, on a structural level, determined by what makes it into the comic. But what gets to be on the page cannot expect any kind of special, tasteful treatment. I think Über readers only learned exactly what they were in for with the concurrent deaths of Hitler and Churchill. If Hitler gets regularly offed by more or less talented creators, Winston Churchill is one of the Gandalfs of WW2, an immediately reassuring presence who eases out your reading by bringing one certainty to it : no matter how bad things get, he’s not going to die. This is the most commonly adopted bias in WW2-based materials : preserving historical figures in order not to throw the audience too much off track. In Über, historical figures enjoy no such immunity. This is an extreme but equally crafty solution to the coexistence of reality-based and purely fictional characters. This is a problem with which a fair share of WW2-based works struggle. Take something like Costa-Gravas’ Amen : the superposition of real-life figure Kurt Gerstein and fictional character Riccardo Fontana doesn’t work at all, as they both serve basically the same narrative purpose and diminish each other’s impact on the story. But in Über, a character’s real-life basis always comes second to the internal logic of the story. That’s not to say there isn’t room for them in the grand scheme of things, but as more and more enhanced characters take the stage, these characters can’t help but feel more and more irrelevant. That is maybe the great paradox at the heart of Über, that it still features a division between the enhanced soldiers instead of one between them and regular humans – a transition Wicdiv underwent recently. I suspect the simplifier or this paradox lies on what Über has to say on Authority, but I’m saving that subject for a separate essay.

But this “no character is ever safe” stance contributes to another sentiment that runs all the way through Über : implacability. This is a very fatalistic comic, probably even more than Wicdiv. This is particularly palpable in the fight scenes. Despite what the covers would have you think, battles in Über are quite short : four, five pages at best before something breaks it down. But most importantly, they are predictable. There is no last minute turnaround in Über : the second the protagonists collide, you know who’s going to fall short. The only unknown factor is just how scarring this defeat will be. Not only that, there is no narrative logic as to who’s going to emerge the winner : Allies are not due a victory because they last suffered a loss, no side can expect proportional returns to its sacrifices, no battleship is guaranteed to win out of virtue of being a charismatic character. There is only one law in Über, and that’s the Rule of war. The winning side wins because they had the superior technology, the superior information, the superior strategy. The issue of a battle is settled long before the two enhanced fighters even meet, as two groups of high-ranking officers stand above some maps. This is why the story of Über so often seems to be happening in its own background : most of the time, what we see is a consequence of the plot more than the plot itself.

The story is not completely devoid of typically Gillen-esque clever bits, like the “cloning” of Hitler and pretty much everything about Maria. But those are outstanders waiting to be integrated in the grand logic of the story, and until then, often feel out of place – Maria in particular.

Then there is the second lens we have to see the story through, one that gives the story the full measure of its fatalistic weight : the narration. I said I wasn’t particularly touched by the art on its own ; however, the contrast between the extreme graphics and the cold, factual narration is one of the comic’s best assets. One of the issues’ back pages feature a script excerpt describing a gory mutated monster in very graphic details ; but this sort of writing never makes it into Über. The narration is abundant, but always curiously removed from the visual action, at times even clunky and annoying to read. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of it until I got to a particular description of a piece of art created by the power of the enhanced men. What was interesting is the mention that it was the “first” one, something that would be impossible to know unless you were observing the scene from a distant point in the future. The narration is dry for a reason : this is archivist talk. Whatever perspective we’re observing the story from, this is one that is way ahead of us, possessing some additional information, short on more trivial matters. Über only tricks you into thinking this is a re-actualisation of WW2 : in its own timeline, the war we’re looking at is long over. The fictional heroes, the historical figures, the technological progress, the countries, they are all trapped in their little sandbox, playing a game that only seems undecided, when in reality everything that will happen will do so to arrive at that unknown moment in the future, the vantage point from which we are watching the ants burn each other.

How can you read Über while holding this intense feeling of vanity ? You can’t ; you have to get into the story, do what the narration cannot do, get closer to these characters, and try to understand them. But you can never fully connect with them either : you are from a different world, both outside and inside the story, a world built on the ashes of the one fuming under your eyes. A world that had to reinvent itself to make sense of the contagious barbarity born of revenge, ideology and desperation. What does the world Über is talking to us from look like ? Does is look like ours ? Is it better ? Worse ? Only one thing is certain : it, too, has suffered a scar. One that may never actually have healed. And this is why, despite the inherent limitations of its premise, despite maybe being too well-minded for its own good, despite the tragic irony of trying to one-up the Nazi threat right at the time it’s being proven the world doesn’t need any kind of incentive to fall for the exact same act a second time, I still think there’s a place for something like Über in WW2-based material. At its core, like several other works over the last year, and maybe premonitorily, Über is about what killed the world.

#über #kieron gillen #caanan white #avatar press #thinkpiece time #yup and this one's a doozy

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