1: America

It’s hard to find anything to say about America that hasn’t already been said. It’s John Wagner at the height of his writing powers, relentlessly moving through a plot that tackles the biggest themes of our societies - law, rights, safety, justice - while also bringing it all back to one “ordinary” man trying to make his way through it all. And find love.

So instead, I’m going to talk a bit about what I often hear in relation to America: that it’s a great introduction or starting point to the world of Dredd. I don’t necessarily agree. For me, America works best as a response to what’s come before it, and a significant touchstone for what comes after. Wagner wrote this story after worrying that readers had come to sympathise with Dredd and the Justice Department, even going so far as to support their authoritarian rule over Mega-City One. America pulls no punches in making the Judges, including Dredd, a force of utter, implacable totalitarian power.

But this wasn’t the first time that Wagner had highlighted this part of the Dredd saga. As we’ll see in upcoming posts as part of the “Democracy” storyline, Wagner and other writers had already made clear that the Judges were problematic, to say the very least. Yes, Dredd had often been portrayed as a hero and saviour, and earlier progs had often been simplistic in their portrayal of Dredd and the Judges stopping crime, but it was never forgotten that they worked in a non-democratic system that stomped all over citizen’s rights.

So America to me can only really work as it’s meant to in that context. It’s Wagner removing all subtlety and complexity about Dredd and the Judges, by introducing subtlety and complexity to the citizens through Ami and Beeny. This isn’t Dredd’s story, it’s theirs - which means we see it through their eyes. With the Judges looming over them with daysticks.

But if this had been the very first time we’d seen Judge Dredd, I doubt we’d still be reading these stories today. Because it isn’t the whole story. Judge Dredd, and the series itself, is more complicated than that. It may have all happened by accident, but introducing Dredd in 1977 with “light” and even ridiculous storylines before introducing darker tones of politics, and then delivering the killer blow in this story, is the right progression. America as a starting point doesn’t give us anywhere to go. The key facet of Dredd is that he is an upholder of a totalitarian system and is prepared to be brutal to uphold it, but that there is also more to him. He has his own, possibly twisted, sense of justice and order. He has a code and sense of fairness, if not respect for rights and equality. Trying to introduce those parts of him if this had been our only knowledge of Dredd wouldn’t have worked, and would have seemed cheap. America works by fitting precisely into the past and future of the character, and the series.

Moving along from that point, I can only echo what others more eloquent than myself have said. The combination of Wagner’s writing and Colin MacNeil’s art is fantastic, and the images that make up the conclusion of the story are some of the most powerful ever seen in the series - if not wider. It’s hard to picture a more perfect summation of some of Dredd’s key themes than the enormous Statue of Judgement standing over the Statue of Liberty, while a citizen is crushed beneath them both.