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 the combination of 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 this 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, Ulf S. Graupner and Sascha Wüstefeld’s Das UPgrade is both narratively and visually complex. As the borders on the page are permeable, with figures and movements extending across panels, so too are the borders of time and space, as the story weaves incessantly between various stages of the past—including prehistory—and the present, and between Old World and New. The gorgeous digitally-created artwork is inspired by East German faux-futurism, Japanese manga, and—in its organic curves—the early days of the GDR’s only notable comic, Mosaik, for which both Graupner and Wüstefeld worked post-unification. Das UPgrade ultimately serves to blur the borders between a German identity based on Ostalgie (nostalgia for the GDR) and a contemporary, even Americanized, satirical sensibility.