The concept behind this book seems like a distillation of the prologue to Grant Morrison's Zenith, where an Allied superman and a Nazi superman fight on the streets of Berlin in 1945, cut short by an atomic bomb. In Uber, the Nazis get the supermen before anyone else, but only manage to deploy them on the brink of defeat, precipitating a desperate arms race as the superior human weapons of the Reich devastate the conventional forces of the Allies on both fronts.

This is not a superhero book, though. This is a book about weapons, and escalation and a new type of war. The supermen are basically walking atom bombs of varying degrees of strength and dexterity, and what follows is cruel and brutal and ugly. It's an Avatar book, so the blood and the guts and limbs fly, and in service to almost any other story you might say it's gratuitous and exploitative, but the development of the story is about the prosecution of a war. The narrative voice is detached and cool and objective, like a historian providing commentary for a documentary. The characters are small set against the huge scale of the conflict, and most of them know it.

It's a cruel, brutal and ugly story and it's a cruel, brutal and ugly book, so why the heck am I reading it on Christmas Eve? It's 2016. Aleppo has fallen, homeless Irish people are squatting in Apollo House, Leonard Cohen is gone, Carrie Fisher is in hospital and the US president elect is announcing a new nuclear arms race via Twitter. Somehow Uber, a comic about what would happen if the Nazis got supermen, is entirely of the moment. I wish it wasn't, but it's still a great comic.