Superheroes punching Nazis has been a comic staple for almost as long as physical comic staples, but it’s the one case where the villain claiming they have much in common should actually work. The idea of the Übermensch predates both superheroes and World War II, and all three combine in Über.
Nazi superhumans arrive at the worst possible time: the Reich has already lost the war, and now everyone else is going to lose as well. The newly-empowered wunderwaffen are unleashed on a world without a Steve Rogers to stop them, and the results are catastrophic.
These enhanced humans could easily have devolved into a gory punchfests, or worryingly fantasized “what if” history, but this is the same Kieron Gillen who gave us Phonogram and Young Avengers. When he tells a war story, it’s one where real characters struggle with the reality they face as well as each other. Artist Canaan White (and later Gabriel Andrade) captures both brutality and personality as the world accelerates into what superheroes would always have been: an arms race where even the weapons lose their lives. And in a world devastated by war, there is still everything, and everyone, to lose.