"When Our Nation Beckons, Real Heroes Answer!"

Don't worry, I'm not writing two GI JOE columns in a row. It's the advertising strapline for Marvel's CALL OF DUTY: THE BROTHERHOOD, a miniseries about firefighters in Brooklyn that goes on sale in June. It's now been over seven months since September 11, but thanks to publishing lead-in times, projects like this are only just making their way onto the shelves.

Obviously, the strapline is playing on the common post-September 11 observation that we had all been drastically undervaluing the heroic work carried out by firefighters and the other emergency services until we were reminded about it. The solicitation copy for CALL OF DUTY goes out of its way to flag up the link, as well. ("Meet James MacDonald, a lieutenant fireman in Brooklyn, stationed right across the bridge from where the Twin Towers used to stand...")

This is not a fundraising book, by the way, but that's not a problem. Marvel has already done a fundraising book. It's perfectly entitled to publish more stories about this subject if it wants to. It's a big event, a perfectly valid subject for art. Nobody expects Vertigo to write out a cheque to a war veterans' charity every time Garth Ennis writes another war story. The same principle applies.

Having said that, it's a little unclear quite where the Twin Towers angle fits into this comic at all. (And if the answer turns out to be "nowhere", then yes, it might well be argued that the advertising is tacky.)

We had all undervalued the work of the emergency services. The actual story information, which is very limited, suggests that this is a story about an ordinary firefighter in the Marvel Universe. That could turn out to be anything. Marvel has also announced a second CALL OF DUTY miniseries, THE PRECINCT, to start the month after, containing a story about weird things happening to a police officer . The solicitation copy for that one makes no allusion to September 11 at all. Reading between the lines, Marvel seems to be setting up the CALL OF DUTY title as an umbrella title for stories about emergency service personnel with strange - possibly even supernatural - overtones.

Getting into this whole area in the context of the Marvel Universe is risky. It's open to attack from the anti-superhero lobby, who will see it as trivialising big issues. It's also open to attack from the critical lobby, since, "How would the Marvel Universe react to September 11?" is not a question anyone wants to hear the answer to.

It's a genre convention of that universe that no matter what happens to it - alien invasions, destructive tidal waves, plague of locusts - everyone gets up and goes back to work the next day as if nothing had happened, so that New York resembles New York again. The answer to, "How would the Marvel Universe react," is ,"They wouldn't, this sort of thing happens to them three times a week". And that isn't a very interesting story, unless you're deliberately doing it to expose the absurdities in the genre.

Marvel did a book about the people who fix its cities after they get smashed, back in the 1980s. It was called DAMAGE CONTROL and was played for laughs. It kind of worked. Doing the same theme with a "street-level" approach is fraught with problems. There's a potentially nasty clash of tone with the shared universe it's set in, and there's a difficult balance to be struck in writing an interesting story about these characters without either offending a public who adore them, or making them so bland that nobody wants to read about them.

Whatever happens in Marvel's universe, everyone's back at work the next day. Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has a history of interest in this theme even before September 11. Back when he was publishing through Event Comics, his flagship book was ASH, about a superhero fireman. But it's true to say that, as a profession, firefighters seemed to be weirdly undervalued until recently.

These are people whose job description is inherently life threatening. You'd have thought that ought to qualify them as one of the most appreciated professions there is, but they'd somehow faded into the background. These people sound like great heroic lead material. Yet they're amazingly overlooked, even in comparison to the other emergency services. Why so few stories about them?

Here's the catch, I think. Suppose we have an ongoing series, or at least a fairly lengthy one, and our protagonist is a firefighter. We want to make that a central feature of the stories. So what's he going to do? He's going to fight fires, of course. He's a firefighter. Well, okay. And then what? Well, he's going to, uh, fight another fire. He can fight a fire and rescue a child. He can fight a fire and stop a chemical explosion. But unless his city is rife with arsonists, he's going to spend most of his time fighting fires that just happened to crop up.

The villain in this story is a force of nature, not a character. The range of possibilities is fairly limited. There are only so many people he can rescue from burning buildings, only so many arsonists he can stop, before our protagonist runs out of variations on the "fighting fires" theme. Of course, you can have very successful stories about people fighting forces of nature - it's the disaster movie genre - but they're one-off stories. They don't sustain well over long periods.

Writing an ongoing story about firefighters cannot be easy. You've got no obvious villain. You've got a protagonist who goes around basically doing endless variations on the same thing, which is enormously heroic of him, but just doesn't lend itself to dramatic arcs. Of course, there must be some fascinating psychological material in there somewhere, but it's not an easy format to work with.

These people sound like great heroic leads. Why so few stories about them? Whereas writers just love the police and the medics, because they carry their own plot devices around with them. They have the same advantages as other professions like private investigators and lawyers - their very job description provides them with a rationale to meet other people who are in conflicts of one sort or another, and get involved. They provide a pre-packaged framework where you can easily plug in your story.

This is particularly glaringly apparent on shows like ER, where once a show without fail, the paramedics will wheel in a stretcher bearing an illustrative example of a social evil, or ALLY MCBEAL, which filled itself with cases whose only function was to be a vehicle for a set of monologues about sexual relations.

You can be much subtler than that, of course, and simply take these jobs as a starting point allowing you to focus straight on the characters without worrying about the set-up. Still, the temptations are obvious. These aren't just professions, they've become genres in their own right, because they do so much of the work for the writer. The poor beleaguered firefighters are far harder to write around, and so creators tend to steer clear unless they really definitely want to write about firefighting. Which, generally, they don't. (After all, it's not as if the people writing medical dramas give a toss about renal failure, or the writers of lawyers shows could care less about principles of tort law.)

If society's idea of heroes and villains is shaped through its stories, then there's always going to be an unfortunate bias towards the people and portrayals that make for a good story. People who plug away day in and day out risking their lives with no obvious dramatic arc just don't qualify. September 11 was an event on such a scale that the rescue effort became the story, and threw them back into the spotlight - leading to a whole load of, "Why don't we appreciate these people more?" musings. They got their day in the sun, and they deserved it.

But chances are they'll be back in the background soon enough, because they just don't lend themselves to easy stories. In the end, the laws of fiction will always win.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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