6: Firepower

It's always interesting to see which stories are included in the Volumes to ensure they reach the right length. Often they're included due to similar writer and artist teams, other times they are more about theme and similar kinds of stories.

With Firepower and Snowstorm (which will be up on the blog tomorrow) it's a bit more difficult to determine exactly why they're here. They're both written by Garth Ennis, a controversial (to say the least) writer for the Dredd strip in the late 1980s, and with art by Colin MacNeil. But we don't really get any of the themes of the previous stories in the Volume here.

Firepower is a one-shot that is basically Dredd as total and complete action hero, dispatching a dozen mutants in three minutes and then quipping about paperwork. There's not really anything here to analyse, except that it highlights Ennis's view of the character as very, very "cool". We'll have bigger Volumes that tackle Ennis's work later on so I don't really want to get into that now, but I think Firepower's inclusion here is to highlight exactly why Wagner wanted to write America.

Wagner was worried that Dredd was actually being seen as a hero and a role model, not as a troubling aspect of a possible totalitarian society. Firepower, and particularly Ennis's portrayal of Dredd, is a great depiction of that. The story is quick and kind of fun, but it's clear that we're meant to see the Judge as a hard-bitten, dry-witted hero - which is much harder for us to swallow now after what we've just read. You can't help but think that Wagner had some very specific kinds of stories in mind to respond to when he sat down to write America.