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Ex Machina Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris 130 pp, DC Comics 
The notion of the unwelcome superhero is not a particularly new one in these post-modern days. It's been done in a number of films, from 'Spider-Man' to 'The Incredibles' (and perhaps most artfully of all in Alan Moore's groundbreaking comic 'Watchmen'), but it's still a resonant trope. I mean, just imagine: you have these incredible powers and yet you're hated and feared by the very people you've sworn to protect. At best you're labeled a crackpot, at worst some sort of terrorist - and all you want to do is save lives. What are you meant to do?Anyway, so 'Ex Machina' is about this superhero who gives up his powers and becomes mayor and discovers that... Sorry? Yes, mayor. Former civil engineer Mitchell Hundred unmasks himself as The Great Machine (a superhero who gained the power to control anything electrical or mechanical after being exposed to a strange, alien technology connected to the Brooklyn Bridge) and runs for Mayor of New York as a left-wing independent candidate in 2002 and wins (which is just one of the ways that you know this is a fantasy). Sure, he still has his powers, but he's abandoned them in favour of public office: in fact, in one scene, he's warned that using his powers to jam a would-be assassin's gun would risk potential Police Union reprisals on behalf of his security detail. Sounds comedic? It's not. In fact, the whole thing is a remarkably sober reflection on politics in the modern age as we follow the trials of an idealistic man trying valiantly to change the world, both from in- and outside the system, while the fact that he has super powers is, in many ways, more of a hindrance than a boon. The story is told with a number of flashbacks, from his childhood in the '70s to his encounter at the bridge in 1999, his career as a vigilante in 2000, his campaign in 2001 (in which he put on the costume one last time to prevent the second plane hitting the World Trade Centre) up until 2005, where his oldest friend is trying to convince him that he's now just a cog in the machine and should return to the heroism, while Hundred's faced with political backbiting, controversial publicly-funded art, infrastructure concerns and a series of murders of snow plow operators that may or may not be connected to an old adversary. Brian K. Vaughan isn't above making some well-placed references to contemporary US politics (on the very first page Hundred looks at the photo of him in full regalia confronting the second plane and sighs "People blame me for Bush in his flight suit and Arnold getting elected Governor, but the truth is those things would have happened with or without me"), and Tony Harris's artwork is broadly photorealistic (indeed, as the montage of pictures as the end of the book shows, all of his frames are based on posed photographs and his characters modeled on actual people). As this is the first volume in a series there are a lot of tantalising hints of plots yet to unravel, not least of which is the Republican Party's attempts to control (or, failing that, destroy) Hundred, but I was swiftly drawn in to 'Ex Machina' - no small feat for a comic in which whether confrontative art should be on public display is a major storyline. If you like your comics a little more political, or wish there were more flying men with magic powers in your polemic literature, this could be the book for you.  |
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