19: Total War

So after years of build-up and small-scale violence killing dozens, Total War take things far beyond anything that could have been suspected in Volumes 1 and 2. In a lot stories, there are moments, events, choices of storytelling that are so big they can obscure everything around it. It's hard to look critically at this story without moving past the three nuclear explosions and the millions dead that form the shocking heart of what we're reading.

Writer John Wagner knows this, and each time the bombs go off, he lets artist Henry Flint take up multiple pages with blinding light and blackened carnage. The story pauses and takes a horrified breath, just as the citizens of Mega-City One not caught in the actual blast do. There's an audacity to this storytelling that still sets the reader back a step.

Yes, Wagner and others have done this kind of thing before in terms of original publication, but it's the first one we get in the order of Mega Collection Volumes. Even if they're now less shocking than they originally were, in an era of "world-shattering" and "game-changing" events that are rebooted and reset in most other series, it's still incredible to think this is one story, one continuity - what happens here matters to the story, and will continue to.

I'm looking big picture here, because zooming in reveals that the details aren't quite as good here. The story is a pure action thriller, a countdown against the terrorist bad guys. There's a tension here that works well, and Wagner is direct and straightforward in showing how Dredd and the Judges face the challenge. There are some other highlight moments, such as Hershey announcing the Judges will stand down in the face of more detonations. Even though we know it's a ploy, it's still effective. But the mechanics of the story aren't new or portrayed in interesting ways.

The Vienna and Nimrod subplot also jars with the main action, and doesn't really seem to go anywhere, or tell us anything new about Dredd or his relationship with his "family". But with so many stories in the Dredd universe, I'm OK with looking at ones like Total War in terms of its impact, and its atmosphere. On both of those points, it's a powerful story.