Harald Havas’s ASH: Austrian Superheroes (2016- ) is a comic about the Neue Wiener Wächter: the red-and-white-clad Captain Austria, Jr. and his teammates Der Bürokrat, Lady Heumarkt and Das Donauweibchen. Their localized code-names identify them as a form of “nationalist superhero,” who “explicitly identifies himself or herself as representative and defender of a specific nation-...

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...

Between 1975 and 1977, the small West German Illu Press published five volumes of Schindel-Schwinger. With clear influences from American underground comics (particularly the work of Vaughn Bodē), the series tells the story of Flohheim, a commune populated by Proben: escaped “prototypes” of living creatures accidentally imbued with life by God in a drunken stupor. To maintain his reputation, God has charged his sons, Petrus and Luzifer, to compete to capture...