Das UPgrade is a projected ten-volume series—now three volumes in—about the only superhero of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic. Ronny Knäusel is born in Dresden in 1967; thanks to alien intervention five millennia ago, an experimental GDR fertility pill, and an American surf-rock song playing on the radio, Ronny can teleport himself and others—but only when he hears the Beach Lords' hit "Palms in Sorrow." As a young man, he uses his ability to spirit defectors across the German-German border to the West. After reunification, however, Ronny is unemployed and unmotivated; that is, until reclusive Beach Lord leader Cosmo Shleym contacts him from California, hoping that Ronny's powers can help him resurrect the wife whose death inspired his greatest hit. But while one faction of aliens seems to be aiding Shleym, another—the immortal Frau Bellmann and her clones—wants to repossess the alien element in Ronny's brain.
Winner of the Independent Comics Prize of the German comics association ICOM in 2013, and the German comics industry's Rudolph Dirks Award in 2016, Ulf S. Graupner and Sascha Wüstefeld's Das UPgrade is inspired by carefully-researched East German faux-futurism and West Coast kitsch, and the early days of the GDR's most notable comic, Hannes Hegen's Mosaik, of which Ronny (like his creators) is an ardent fan. Behind the gorgeous digitally-created artwork, however, the series resists the apparent yearning for social norms established under the East German dictatorship known as Ostalgie—as Wüstefeld says, "We're making fun of the GDR" (Sittnick)—and trades instead in "retro," which Czech scholar Victoria Pehe describes as "a relationship to the [totalitarian socialist] past devoid of emotional longing, which is predicated on a position of superiority to the past while enabling a vicarious enjoyment of its aesthetics" (Pehe, "Socialism Remembered" 4).

References

Sittnick, Jana. "Ein tiefer Griff in die eigene Kindheit." TAZ: Die Tageszeitung 1 May 2015. http://www.taz.de/!558876/,
Pehe, Veronika. "Retro Reappropriations: Responses to The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman in the Czech Republic." VIEW
Journal of European Television History and Culture 3.5 (2014): 100-107.
---. "Socialism Remembered: Cultural Nostalgia, Retro, and the Politics of the Past in the Czech Republic, 1989-2014." PhD
Diss., University College London, 2016.
Wüstenfeld, Sascha, and Ulf S. Graupner. Das UPgrade. Nos. 1-3. Berlin: Zitty/Cross Cult, 2012-2016.