Comics Review: Ex Machina

Early in Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days, the reader is hit with a surprisingly eerie re-imagining of the post-9/11 World Trade Center: the first tower is gone, replaced with the memorial beacon of light, but the second is still standing.

This new political graphic novel written by Brian K. Vaughan, penciled by Tony Harris, inked by Tom Feister and released on DC’s Wildstorm label, is full of such strikingly original moments. The First Hundred Days collects the first five issues of the Ex Machina series.

The main character, Mitchell Hundred, is the mayor of New York and the world’s only superhero—in fact, the world’s only political superhero. Its protagonist’s remarkable abilities are an interesting wrinkle rather than the center of the plot. A civil engineer by trade, he stumbles onto a Generic Glowing Object (itself an instance of deus ex machina present in nearly every superhero’s origin story) that explodes and inscribes curving scars on his face reminiscent of the metallic tracery on a circuit board.

Hundred is immediately bombarded by chatter from the machines all around him; somehow, he can understand them and they can understand him. If he tells a gunman’s weapon to jam, it misfires; if he says “lights to half,” the bulbs around him obey. He can even converse with microwaves.

So, of course, he becomes a superhero—“The Great Machine”—and dons a really goofy-looking suit. With the help of his best friend and his mentor, he builds the cool gadgets that start coming to him in dreams. Zipping around the city in a jetpack, he tries to save lives. Problem is, he’s not so good at it. His wild powers end up causing more trouble than they prevent. In a typical example, he saves a kid by shouting “full stop!” at an oncoming train, but inadvertently shuts down the NYC subways for hours. Despite his single success—diverting that second World Trade Center plane on September 11—he retires his gear.

But he still wants to help, and decides to run for mayor on the strength of his heroic reputation, beating Bloomberg in a landslide. But not all is well in Gotham. He’s soon forced to deal with a blizzard, a Giuliani-esque confrontation with idiotic city-funded art, and gay marriage rights. The only superheroics, in fact, occur during Mitchell’s flashbacks to his brief crime-fighting career and are generally played for comic relief. In one of the best anecdotes, he gets beaten up by the city’s tough female police commissioner as punishment for his goofy antics.

The real reason Ex Machina is so addictive, however, is that its characters are likeable and multi-dimensional. Mitchell’s dreadlocked deputy mayor generates much of the political tension, arguing with Mitchell over school vouchers and gay marriage. Kremlin, Mitchell’s grizzled Russian mentor, strains their relationship by trying to get Mitchell out of politics and back on the jetpack. Even Mitchell’s mother appears for a few quirky-yet-tender moments, when the story flashes back to his childhood.

To back up this strong writing, Ex Machina’s characters are drawn with incredible detail. They bite their lips and let sadness and laughter crinkle the corners of their eyes. The realism comes out of the artists’ remarkable process: they based each character on a real person, and had their subjects pose for every frame of the book. Then, the pictures were edited into the planned layout for the comic, and Harris made his sketches directly from these references.

In a great little bonus, this collection includes several depictions of this process, showing side-by-side versions of the photo reference, pencil-sketched page and final product. It is a treat to see how eerily close the final panels are to the photos.

Harris and Feister use three subtly different color schemes: the book’s colors seem slightly washed-out in the political scenes, the outdoor scenes are rendered in lush, oil-paint-like detail, and most of Mitchell’s flashbacks are rendered in pale green tints reminiscent of the scenes in the virtual world of The Matrix.

Simply, there are not enough graphic novels that take place in the real world; while the strange dreamlands of The Sandman or the mutant-racism allegory of X-Men allow for beautiful artistic and narrative latitude, these books can refer to real-world issues only obliquely. Ex Machina, however, does it directly and with wry humor. Mitchell comments on the limits to his heroic powers: “People blame me for Bush in his flight suit and Arnold getting elected governor. But truth is…those things would have happened with or without me.”

Indeed, as American politics become more and more surreal, Ex Machina starts to seem less and less far-fetched.