Graphic Content: a sense of Dredd

Yet Dredd, much as I loved Carlos Ezquerra's art, I struggled with. I struggled mostly with the concept of Dredd's "Dirty Harry in the future" fascism. I was under the mistaken impression that the strips wanted me to see him as a heroic figure. In truth, Dredd's creators were a lot more ambivalent towards him than that.

Looking back, you could even argue that in the early years Dredd was effectively a Deus Ex Machina in Mega City One. A plot resolution device on a motorbike. The strip often played with the Chaucerian fable form - the perp's tale if you like, in which attempts to get rich quick would come to a miserable, usually Dredd-inspired, end. A post-punk Chaucer, garnished with countless pop culture references and anti-establishment attitude.

But comic strips, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And inevitably Dredd came increasingly into focus. The Dirty Harry reference isn't a throwaway one. There was a similar momentum in the strips as in the Clint Eastwood films. Like Harry Callahan, Dredd's fascist tendencies were eventually played as the lesser evil when compared to Judge Death and the Dark Judges who reckoned that life itself was a criminal act.

By the time John Wagner and Colin MacNeil came to create the story America in 1990 - now repackaged as part of the first volume of the new Hachette Judge Dredd collection - morally ambivalent comic book characters were all the rage. We were just a matter of years on from Frank Miller's reboot of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns and Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen. (On a wall of Mega City One there's even graffiti asking "Who Judges the Judges?", a reference to the question at the heart of Moore and Gibbons's superhero saga.)

Reading the story almost 25 years on it's depressing that, if anything, Wagner's story is even more timely than it was when it came out. It is an examination of the idea of freedom and what we choose to give up in the name of security and what lengths some will go to in order to assert their idea of freedom. Rereading it, the phrase "war on terror" kept leaping into my mind.

The America in question is the country, of course, but it also refers to America Jara (a surname that inevitably makes one think of the Chilean singer and political activist Victor Jara who was assassinated in 1973 in Chile murdered by soldiers in the military coup that brought General Pinochet to power). This America was born in Mega City One, the daughter of "immies", named for her father's new hope for a new country. "My dad says this is America and it's a free country," she tells a Judge when she's stopped as a kid. "Yeah? What century's he living in?" is the reply.

"We didn't need ghosts or goblins or vampires," the narrator Benny Beeny, America's friend, explains. "We had the judges. And they were worse. We knew they did exist."

The story is one of America's disillusionment, a disillusionment that ultimately leads her into terrorism and a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. It doesn't end well for her. As Dredd himself declares right at the beginning: "Justice has a price. The price is freedom."

It was this play on the limits of tolerance that impressed me when I first read Wagner's supple, terse story. But now what strikes me most is the story's attack on the way men treat women. America is the most attractive, assertive character in the story and yet she is used by almost every man she comes in contact with. She is beaten up by Judges on a democracy march while pregnant only for the judges to then end the pregnancy because of the foetus's "genetic abnormality". And she is ultimately betrayed by her best friend Benny who then takes the betrayal to another lurid sci-fi level, effectively stealing America's identity.

Wagner continues exploring questions of female agency in a number of subsequent stories gathered in this Hachette edition. And so what we have here is - you might argue - a feminist text. It just comes with big guns.

A new book in Judge Dredd: The Mega Collection series will be published every fortnight.