5 out of 5

Ya got yer ‘Y,’ and ‘Saga’ is for sure shaping up, but Ex Machina is – for my comic money – the Vaughan comic to stand by; the most balanced long-running series he’s worked on, AND one of the most satisfying – issue by issue – books I’ve had the joy to collect.

Describing this as a series about an ex-superhero who becomes Mayor of New York is entirely accurate and actually gives a pretty good capsular idea of how the read goes, and is yet woefully short-sighted in terms of suggesting the impact of things.  There have been plenty of series that toy with the concept of heroes trying to blend into the real world and the logistics – both when ‘secret’ identities are public and not – of doing that.  Those series tend to get some press and then peter out quickly because you can only do so much with a concept before you need an actual storyline.

‘Y’ got out attention because of how boldly executed the concept was, and wrangled us along for 60 issues because the characters were well developed, and we wanted to know what the fuck was up with the plague – Yorick’s girl-quest floating in and out of the series while Vaughan extended and extended his quest storyline.  The series ended just in time, but not before dragging us through some very obvious filler issues.

New Yorker Mitchell Hundred is a city planner who’s taking a look at an odd structure attached to one of the city’s bridges when said structure blows up in his face, and suddenly he gets the power to listen to and speak to machines – the visual representation of this taking a note from Preacher and just doing something effective but simple – changing the text style to a green LEDish look to let us know when Hundred’s going techy.  The book flashes back and forth during Hundred’s years in office and some times before and after to show us how he came into the position and the trials and tribulations along the way – including conflicts with other color-speaking weirdos who seem to have been granted different shades of the same power (speaking to plants, speaking to animals) – all while playing around with timely political issues.  So how did he get his powers?  And what’s it like being a superhero in office?

Brian dodges ever story-killing bullet by smartly leaning his tale toward the political, and letting the other aspects add up as organic pieces of the puzzle.  The ‘why’ is not the central theme of the story, and yet it flutters appropriately through to influence events in various ways and doesn’t just feel like an excuse for a liberal soapbox because Mitch’s past life absolutely influences his decisions, but unlike ‘Y’ that starts with the plague and thus sets up our big question mark for the series, ‘Ex’ starts by just giving us some hero tropes we can understand, and then making it clear that this hero is now the mayor.  We don’t actually care about the why right away because it’s not presented as important to the story.  Oh, oh, but how does he deal with protecting his secret identity?  …And this is subverted by doing something brilliantly simple: people already know about his past.  Check.  And we’re kept in check story-wise the same way Mitchell is kept in check in office – the NSA has made it clear he can’t talk about or use his powers in public.  And Mitch is kept in check character-wise by something… equally… brilliantly simple – he, in a way, doesn’t want his powers.  Ex Machina is, in part, Brian’s exploration of how government could be run for effectively, but he’s a character writer, and Hundred is one of his mostly lovingly nuanced – through his experiences as ‘The Great Machine’ (his hero name), he comes to realize how people don’t take responsibility for themselves, or for their actions, and how covering his face and swooping in to save the day is only encouraging that behavior in a sense, no matter how much good he does.  So how can he enact real change?  How can he make people… help themselves?  It’s not as a hero, it’s as a regular man.

There are too many excellent details to mention here about the story and aspects of each character, not to mention how that ‘why’ actually ends up getting resolved in a way that puts the more open-ended speculation of ‘Y’ ‘s ending to shame.  But overwhelmingly, what makes Ex work so well is that Brian doesn’t take one side, and he doesn’t let himself lapse into easy opinions.  He attempted this tack in Y by having Yorick challenge women’s gender concepts and women challenge his gender concepts, and tossing them back and forth to show there’s rarely a black and white answer, but again, things sometimes got lost in the shuffle of romances and monkeys and factoids in that book.  For every political or social stance that you think Mr. Vaughan is going to present pretty whole-heartedly, he’ll toss a curveball in there to make it hard to say, definitively, that A is better than B or C.  It really drives home the ‘think for yourself’ point, and though Hundred fits the snarky character design that Brian reuses a quite a bit, by having a job that requires him to face the issues he’s snarky about, it wipes the smirk off of things at the right moments.

Whaaaateveer.  It is, for better or worse, a comic that’ll lose some impact as the that-point-in-time references lose scope, but the core of the story is strong enough to withstand it.  And fuck me if I’ve seen a better first / last issue framing element that skews your view on the character and story without feeling like a twist and without ruining the value of what you’ve read or the enjoyment of rereading it.

This was probably a tough series to write, and to stay focused on, but I hope Bri gets frustrated enough again at some point (as the book was a response to political blase, according to wiki) to channel his thoughts so effectively.