Gillen Über Alles: How to Tell Stories with Nazis [Interview]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a super-powered Nazi walks into a bar during World War 2 and kills everyone in the bar in the most horrific ways imaginable. Also, this isn’t a joke.

Such is the case with “Über,” Avatar’s latest ongoing series written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Caanan White, detailing an alternate reality in which the Axis is able to harness superhuman abilities to aid them in their fight against the Allies. It is dark and grim in exactly the ways you think it would be, with so much moral uncertainty it’s practically bubbling over at the top.

Yet, strangely enough, nobody seems to be talking about the book, for better or for worse. It’s almost as if people don’t want to talk about Nazis or something.

Well, allow us to correct this issue for you today as we look at all things “Über”, with added commentary from series writer Kieron Gillen, in this mega piece — Gillen Über Alles: How to Tell Stories with Nazis.

Getting Dark

In “Über,” readers are put into the depths of war. It’s a horrid place, one where light clearly does not have access to, and it’s marked by committed atrocity after committed atrocity. The book opens up ostensibly known with a healthy dose of Holst’s “Mars, Bringer of War” and displays for readers via beautifully horrid illustrations by Caanan White just exactly what kind of mess of trouble they are no in.

The strange thing about this, though, is that if you’ve been reading Gillen’s work elsewhere then this might appear as a bit of culture shock. More well known for ostensibly lighter works of graphic fiction such as “Phonogram” or the current iteration of “Young Avengers,” the book is nothing like Gillen’s work in comics so far. Gillen’s general output (if one can generalize as such accurately) is often more whimsical or playful, with characters who seem to have as much fun in their respective stories as Gillen clearly does writing them. Sure, there are books with serious tones, but it’s usually a build up to that; the earliest arcs of “Journey into Mystery” are marked by Loki’s clever tongue as much as they are his twisted actions and questionable justifications, even if the entire run ends on a bit of a downer. Even Sinister was kind of a joy to read when “Uncanny X-Men” relaunched, and his name is Sinister (he’s literally a monster).

This is the way that Gillen usually disarms the reader to bring them into his worlds. It’s not that darker stories are unheard of to his fans and readership, its just simply not at the forefront of the work. You usually don’t think of the origins of the Disir so much as what happened with/to them, — or, for perhaps a better/more spoiler-y example, it’s not the “end” of Leah’s story that is remembered so much as everything she did with Loki up until then. This is just the technique that Gillen employs; an open invitation at the beginning goes a long way towards creating affection and a visceral emotional reaction with the readership.

With “Über,” the stage is set a bit differently. Given the leads that the book finds in Nazi commandants, all of whom are essentially mass murderers comfortable with their lot, that early ray of sunshine and all quirks Gillen is known for with Marvel or Image books is absent — and there’s a good reason for it. “As much of a signature work “Phonogram” clearly is, it’s not me,” Gillen told me while discussing the book. “It’s me about certain subjects I hold dear. “Über” is about a lot of things that simply don’t fit in there. “Phonogram” thinks unimportant things are the most important thing in the universe. “Über” thinks unimportant things are bordering on immoral.”

It’s a shocking change of pace at first, almost frightening. The assumptions one can have about Gillen’s work — certainly the ones that I had going into the book — make for a disconcerting first read; instead of knocking politely and asking for permission to come inside, the door is kicked down as stormtroopers march in. Here’s a book that, right from the very beginning, takes no prisoners in tone and in story — it’s angry, it’s gritting its teeth at you, it’s practically frothing at the mouth. A seemingly apt metaphor would be that you’ve gone to a shelter to find a new puppy since you’ve heard how cute their dogs are, and instead you’re greeted with the biggest, meanest, angriest pitbull of a dog that’d make Cujo weep. It’s that kind of book.

Not that it should be a surprise, mind you. Most of the covers feature pretty unrelenting gore, a definite trademark from books published by Avatar, and the introductory Zero Issue of the book (originally written about five years ago) gives us a story that’s as bleak as anything ever was, with Nazi’s gaining further control and wreaking havoc in a war that’s not prepared to deal with their newest brand of horror. This isn’t just toeing around the ideas of silly Nazis who can be defeated by men in spandex full of the American Spirit; the characters in this book are smart and intelligent men and women who live war and breathe chaos, at home in the razing of cities more than anywhere else.

It all makes sense, if you know what to expect. “To paraphrase my old friend J Nash,” Gillen says, “just because I’m funny, don’t assume I’m joking. The serious moral intent behind what I write becomes a lot more evident when you strip away the majority of the levity.”

It’s a true enough notion, after all. Not to belabor the comparisons, but even works like “Journey into Mystery” have their darker undertones that are cleverly masked with BFFs and milkshakes. The inherent difference between titles, though, is that “Über” finds Gillen inherently comfortable enough with stripping away some of that pretense and allowing his darker tendencies to take over.

To that end, “Über” allows Gillen a good outlet, like comic book therapy almost. “Über” stands as a bleak dissertation on the dark and appalling nature of man, what we’re willing to do to one another when the moral compass is thrown out the window. It’s about fighting back against an impossible enemy and the futility of it, and it’s about making hard choices that you’ll have to live with by yourself. It’s about how god damned doomed we all are, standing on the bones and ashes of predecessors for “the greater good.” It’s a very human book from someone who is clearly not too big a fan of humanity, and while this could potentially get lost in the superhuman aspect of it all, its certainly not as optimistic as previous books in Gillen’s career in comics so far.

“With the passing of Iain Banks, I also realised the part of me that fell in love with his books as a teenager is really to the front with “Über.” It’s the part of me that loved the Manics’ The Holy Bible. I’m a lot angrier than I suspect people think.”

“Über” is pretty much a scream at humanity for being the way it is. I wish I didn’t feel the need to write it.”

Getting Historical

Another big and certainly not to be understated aspect about “Über” is the historical aspect. Yes, its a book about the folly of man and its even a meditation on violence and awful people (which we’ll get to), but a big piece of it is about history and how we look at history.

At the forefront, its a rather unrelenting look at modern war history through the eyes of the future. While its not often discussed or particularly noticed, comics in particular have seen a rather large rise in speculative revisionist historical fiction, in which any number of historical actions are viewed through a modern lens and tweaked as per our whims. It’s not all as big or bold as giving Nazi’s super powers and letting them win, but there’s definitely a fascination that is shared about what could’ve been if only past imaginations were caught up to our own.

For “Über,” the use of history within the book serves a more ancillary function. “I had a take on the period before I dug into it, which has had light and shade added to it in the process of research,” Gillen notes. “The research’s primary aim is to lend credulity to situation, to make it feel like the alternate history rather than something more fantastical.”

It’s certainly an interesting take on the notion. Other more recent historical revisions in comics, such as the popular Image book “The Manhattan Projects” by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra, seem to revel in their ability to take a few known aspects of history and stray from it in wildly imaginative ways. It makes it fun, in so many words. “Über,” on the other hand, plays it a bit more close to the vest — though even then, it doesn’t appear (four issues in) to be a slave to where it inherently came from.

Part of this has to do with the general bevy of Nazi and WW2 fiction available. Nazi’s are, after all, history’s greatest monsters; if there was ever an easy go-to to illicit specific set of readily accessibles emotions from the audience, throwing Nazi’s into the mix certainly does the trick. From Captain America to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Casablanca or even the Producers, putting Nazis onto the stage means that your audience will “get it.”

WW2 itself is an easy place to mine for stories, both of horror and great spirit. However, to a certain extent — one not often discussed, strangely enough — the atrocity and nightmare reality of WW2 has been lost to the sands of time, instead being replaced by this glamorized version of itself in which heroes are born and fight against the greatest injustices the world as we know it has ever known. There’s a reality to it all, but even our notions of what that reality is is certainly viewed through certain glossy lenses. It’s just a Hollywood glamour of glamour, and its very rare that a book reminds you of how bleak of an experience for those involved that it was.

As such, Gillen looks to “Über” in as different a way as possible in order to allow this series to stand apart from the crowd. “With Nazis and WW2 and superheroes being such well played out conventions, even all wrapped together, trying to reclaim an authenticity is absolutely key. You have to buy into it, to make it feel authentic. Perhaps eventually not realistic, but to at least see the larger point the choices make.”

So the research adds a certain aspect to the narrative, but it can only be used so far before it starts to work against the plans of the series. This isn’t Inglourious Basterds in terms of liberal use of a setting or time frame in order to tell a story, but there’s certainly a small aspect of that same story-driven aspect at play here. “I have the shape of the story I want to tell, but I have to place it. When I get to Okinawa, I was looking at what days it rained and various offensives to work out where to place certain key scenes. It’s the buy-in. And it makes “Über” one of the most stressful books I write.”

“When doing “Three”,” Gillen elaborates in relation to his upcoming Image book with Ryan Kelly about Spartan Helots, “my consultants at the University of Nottingham seemed surprised I cared as much as I did about making it as accurate as it is. They were very aware that stories are stories and history is history. I suspect that comes from my background as a journalist in some way too. Truth is important to me. (In as much as the arguments you make about history are interpretative and even relative, the facts are not, and you want to use the strongest bedrock for your arguments.)”

So “Über ” strives for authenticity if not accuracy, which seems very much in line with some of the books influences. An easy comparison for “Über” would perhaps be the war-based works of Garth Ennis, to which Gillen mentions in the backmatter of the first issue. Ennis is certainly known for his precision eye towards war and the horror thereof, but he never the less finds interesting and fantastical ways to approach the material. If there were ever a tone set for what a modern reader might expect out of a war fiction comic book, you could easily look to Ennis to having set that standard.

And there is, of course, a definitive set of problems that can come along when doing a book like “Über.” In fact, while Gillen has been known in the past to utilize a certain set of playfully deprecating behavior in letters columns (which in part seems more of just an acclimation to general aspects about British humor then literal doubt, although who knows), this is a book that genuinely stresses him out. “There’s a moment in THE BOYS, where it breaks from its normal tone, and you have the patriotic superhero analogue begging for his life in a “please don’t kill me – I fought in the war” way. And the Boys look down and you get an incredible line: “No you didn’t. And you’re an insult to those who did.””

Where Tarantino blazed through history with little to no care of the consequences, Gillen looks at “Über” with a very careful lens towards the tonality and the execution (again: authenticity over just accuracy). It is certainly a book that expresses a generally dark sentiment on the writer’s behalf, but one that never the less wishes to be respectful of where it has found its fictional home. That’s actually one of the more interesting aspects of the book, really, because while it doesn’t purport itself to strictly be historical fiction in any general definition of the term, not even really the Ennis one, the book never the less doubles as a somber memorial to the horrors of its time, which may ultimately be one of the books’ saving graces in the end.

“Between going to press and it coming out, I’m always in a panic about something or another. I’m aware that sooner or later I’m going to have to mea culpa about something big. Doing the work is part of me trying to step around that j’accuse.”

So the historical aspect of the book isn’t so specific as to just be a history lesson. Rather, the book invites the idea of history as just as capable a source for exciting and even new stories to explore and learn from as much as anything else. “I do find history interesting, and increasingly so,” Gillen notes. “Of all the books I’m presently writing, only two aren’t period pieces to at least a small degree:”Young Avengers” and an new thing I’m kicking around. Even “Iron Man” circled around a very light retro work in ‘Secret Origin.'”

Because in looking at history within the guise of fiction, its very easy to see material to mine in order to ask questions that are still relevant today. “How are we the same? How are we different? How did we get from there to here? How do we live in its shadow? They’re questions you can see in a lot of my work, including “Phonogram.” My Manchester Gods and Sinister-related stories over at Marvel were me processing the Industrial Revolution’s effect on how I live today. I want to do something similar with the French Revolution down the line.”

Getting Violent

The question then becomes — with a book like “Über” on a publisher like Avatar, how far is too far?

In relation to a thought from the previous section, I’ve yet to see much for which Gillen has to apologize so far personally. The book is definitely violent and has a heart of darkness at its core, but its generally on par with what you’d expect from Avatar in general. Avatar is a publisher that is known particularly for books in a given style, one that emphasizes the violence and the uncomfortable moments to the extreme. They’re the publisher of “Neonomicon” by legendary writer Alan Moore, full of all the unsettling Elder God rape you could ever want (assuming that’s something you want, I suppose), and they’re the publisher of “Crossed” which makes “The Walking Dead” look a bit like My Little Pony. “Über” certainly stands among those as the latest and greatest proud member of a decidedly violent line of comics.

When mixed with a story of historical value, the terror becomes that much more palpable. Again, one of the aspects of WW2 that is lost to the romantic fictional notions of our time is that it wasn’t as bad as it truly is, that maybe the atrocities being committed could be ignored. However, if I may break the veil of objectivity a bit here: growing up in a Jewish household myself and having attended a Jewish high school for two years, I’ll at least confirm that there are those who have never forgotten and those who will never forget. For some, the nightmare of WW2 is a never-ending one, one that can be seen from closed eyes and looks nothing at all like Valkyrie or Enemy at the Gates or any number of movie that seeks to make WW2 somehow entertaining. There are people who look at our fascination in making war in general somehow entertaining with disgust. (It’s primarily the reason I just don’t like war movies.)

So if one of “Über’s” basic goals is to be horrific and to do it in a setting that hasn’t been particularly viewed as horrific in some time, then the book succeeds ten-fold.

“The problem is trying to present it in a way that we consider moral,” Gillen concedes.  “With a “Crossed book,” as violent and shocking as it is, there’s often glee. Look at the dolphin fucking that opens ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE,’ for example. That’s a standard horror movie approach. You want to see the death.”

“With “Über,” we tried to make it so you didn’t. It helps that Caanan shares my concerns about the book. We want it uncomfortable, because it is.”

To say its uncomfortable is perhaps putting it lightly. While I didn’t have the chance to talk with him about the book for this piece, looking at Caanan’s work is about as unsettling as it goes. The art of the book is beautiful in its execution and yet never the less intimidating in its no-holds-barred revelry of destruction. White’s work elicits responses akin to a mix of amazement and disgust, which seems perfectly appropriate for the title — even if it can at times make for a difficult read.

It’s not even a question of how much gore is too much, mind you. Gore is gore, violence in war is violence in war; you’re either comfortable with it to a degree or you’re not. What makes White’s work so different for this title, though, is that there’s no pageantry in it. This not the violence of “Kick-Ass” or the aforementioned “Crossed,” this is “Über” and Nazis and WW2 and rampant barbarism and madness and questionable characters and every uncomfortable moment of dark humanity put on display. Making this show-y like some Vegas performance of misdirection would be dishonest, and White understands that. So he makes you cringe.

And if some of the art in this piece doesn’t get that point across to you in some way on its own, then perhaps I haven’t picked the best pieces. The ones I’ve chosen, though, show the wide variety of work you can expect from White in the series; there are the big bombastic moments of pure insanity, and there are the smaller moments where even the most likely of hero candidates can’t catch a break in standard hero tropes. White’s done an excellent job of taking a dark world and twisting it just enough to leave it believable while still being impossibly bleak, and it leaves the reader in a place of uncertainty to where they stand with the book’s central leads.

For the record: for my standard of gore, the book is just fine. My standard, if I can call it that, is basically that I’m comfortable with any illustrated or fictional whatever (though I can’t stand the real stuff for obvious reasons), so I can enjoy looking at some of the more brutal works White puts in the book — although enjoy isn’t the best word choice there. That said, I’d by dishonest if I didn’t note that reading “Über” isn’t an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, because it is difficult at times to look upon these works and not despair.

And that is, for all intents and purposes, a good thing. If you could read this without feeling disturbed by one thing or another then Gillen and White wouldn’t be doing their jobs right. I’d rather firmly posit that they are.

Getting in Character

“Über” hasn’t gone to a place where the envelope has been pushed so far as to make the book irredeemable, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t get there someday — especially when the characters are rather difficult to inherently like.

That’s one of the greatest challenges of “Über’s” narrative: despite the Allied Forces inherently being the good guys, both sides are seen through rather unforgiving eyes. The lead heroine, if she can be called that, is a scientist by the name of Stephanie who is just as to blame for the atrocities as Nazi ambition. She’s the only person we can seemingly attach our hopes to, but at the same time she’s a character with just as ostensibly selfish an attitude as those she stands against.

To get into more specifics would certainly be spoiler-based, though the attached images to this article probably don’t help not spoil anything. Suffice it to say, Stephanie has a rather dark moment in the second issue (third in the series) in which she essentially makes a great sacrifice and justifies it rather poorly, part of which is seen below. It’s things like this that essentially take your hope away, because as much as you may want to believe, she and Gillen and White won’t let you.

This can somewhat create a problem for most, because where most people find themselves within fiction of this nature is through the characters; the make/break point for many work can be whether or not a reader enjoys reading about and rooting for the leads, and “Über” makes the rooting for part very difficult. There’s a part of it that you have to justify yourself as the nature of war, but when looking for a hero to follow you may come up at a loss.

Of course, that is the point. “The book is what it is,” says Gillen of this scene. “My bigger worry isn’t avoiding unlikeable characters – it’s avoiding an implicit argument of moral equivalence by having everyone so vile.”

“The figures you’re laying your hope on are hopelessly ethically compromised. Stephanie has been destroyed emotionally by what she’s done… but she’s done it. She’s also our only hope for the first few issues.”

That tight-rope walk of moral relativism is perhaps the most compelling aspect of “Über.” It’s not every day that you find yourself with a book where there is no one to root for and no hope to be found. We’ve been introduced so thoroughly to the idea of what can be generally defined as tin soldiers marching into war that we begin to distance ourselves from any kind of personal relation to anything more than stock protagonists. It’s very easy to come up with an idea of WW2 in your head because we’ve been engrained with so many tropes — and its those tropes that “Über” so actively acts out against.

That’s because history is written by the victors. Were WW2 to have played out differently, our understandings of the events that occurred could and would be fundamentally different. “Über” capitalizes on this to a good degree, and balances the leads of the book as such. “I try for characters you find compelling and you understand. Especially early on, it’s often a villain protagonist book – in that the motivation to read is dread. You hope the majority of the characters aren’t going to succeed. It’s that kind of horror book.”

Granted, when Gillen mentions “villain protagonist,” he’s not saying it lightly. This isn’t some kind of month-long spectacle in which the bad guy gets a spotlight. This isn’t even a mini in which one of comics’ greatest monsters is given a personable backstory (as much as I like Greg Pak’s writing, the “Red Skull: Incarnate” book was a tricky tight rope walk). No, “Über” has bad guys and then worse guys, because the horror of war does not only breed the stuff of legend.

This isn’t to say there will never be a true hero of the story, of course. “As we progress, I suspect they’ll be more characters people consider “likeable”, but there remains an edge to them. I’ll be a lot happier when we get to some Enhanced Humans on the allied side, if only as it’ll allow us to have someone who isn’t a Nazi on the cover.”

This focus allows us to view the content in a much more broad scale. We can look at the work of any of the super-powered leads or even Hitler and view them in a specific context, but Stephanie’s inclusion makes things more interesting: she gives us no choice but to look at the bigger picture. There’s nothing particularly black nor white about the series, and “good” guys with questionable actions forces the reader to quantify whether or not things truly are for the greater good.

Which is a scary question to be asking.

Which is also the best, most important question to be asking.

And which is why “Über” is that much more of a dark and compelling read.

“In a real way, the people I want to create sympathy for are the victims. I leave it open to the reader to decide who they are.”

At its forefront, “Über” would appear to be a book in which super-powered Nazis who you won’t like try to take over the world, while the Allies and all their goody goodness stand up against them. You’d think, from looking at it and understanding what you know about WW2 and WW2 fiction that you’d be reading a flashy story in which everything ends up OK.

But that’s not what “Über” is at all. Instead, “Über” is a book that doesn’t want to be your friend. It doesn’t want you to just like it and put it in a bag and a board, but rather to take the material and the content and put it into a personal context; it’s a book about WW2 and it’s a book about what war means to humanity and what humanity means to war.

For Gillen, “Über” exists as sort of a mixed bag in that regard. It’s clearly a passion project, but its also a nightmare. It’s one that can be difficult to read, yet remains just as fascinating a work from Gillen as any of his previous books. “Honestly, I try not to think about finding an audience too much with “Über.” It’s very much a book whose primary concern is making it work, and hoping an audience exists to support it. That it’s done as well as it has is clearly a relief, but that’s never really been on my mind. My worries are always about the execution.”

“I’d rather it be cancelled and be as I want it than become the new Walking Dead and fail in its intended design.”

And while its dark nature certainly means that it is not for everyone, those that do come to “Über” are rewarded with a series that has clearly stared into the abyss and had the abyss stare back at it.