“Ex Machina” #2

This review was commissioned by @toxinvictory.


It's been a long time since I looked at the first issue of DC Comics series "Ex Machina," and I've been looking forward to getting back to it. The first issue told the story of left-leaning civil engineer Mitchell Hundred's upbringing, transformation into the technopathic superhero Great Machine, and retirement from superherodom and inauguration as the mayor of New York City. An election he won largely due to the optics of him donning his flight suit one last time to prevent the second plane from impacting the south World Trade Center tower.

So, let's see how his first term as mayor starts out. Mitchell already fended off a political blackmail attempt by threatening to short out the blackmailer's pacemaker before the inauguration, and avoided assassination during his inaugural address by making the attacker's gun misfire. What that foreshadows about his policy decisions, I have no idea.


The cover page is a departure from where I thought we might be going.

Undead cyber-Lincoln, eh? Well sure, why not add another patriotic, tech-themed superhero to this world's millennial America, it fits!

Roll back to June, 2001, right at the tail end of the Great Machine's superhero career. The NYC police commissioner is complaining about how unfair public opinion is toward the department, and fantasizing about punching lawyers. It's framed in a way that's seemingly geared toward making us sympathize with her as a beleaguered woman with too much on her plate.

Well, that aged like a strawberry milkshake. :/

As she leaves the office and heads out to the gym, she's suddenly grabbed and swooped off into the air by the Great Machine while her flunkies look on helplessly.

He sets her down on a rooftop somewhere nearby and tries to get her to stop panicking. The reason he snatched her is, apparently, because he's been trying to reach her by phone and hasn't been successful, and he couldn't think of a better way than this.

-_-

You'd think a technopath of Mitchell's caliber would be able to find a way to call a phone she'd pick up. Or like. Finding her home address and ringing the doorbell. Mitchell has made some poor judgement calls in the last issue, but here he actually comes across as unhinged.

Given that this is immediately before his retirement as the Great Machine, I guess you could generously infer that the stress of his string of failures and doubts, combined with the power trip of recently becoming a superhuman, is getting to him in a dangerous psychological snowball effect. Not that that makes him look good, but it at least makes him look less bad than the alternatives.

Ignoring his attempts at diplomacy, she reaches into her bag. He warns her that guns are useless against him because of his power over mechanical dynamism. She pulls out a nightstick and cracks him right across the visor.

Disinclined though I am to be sympathetic to this lady, Indiana Jones moments are always pretty badass.

Fortunately for Mitchell, his helmet is solid enough to tank that hit while leaving him with only superficial injuries. He threatens to tase her if she doesn't calm down, but his ignorance of basic pacification techniques just angers her further; you're supposed to use the taser when the suspect is already beaten to the ground, and then shoot them when they flinch too violently from the shock. Still, she's able to suppress her NYPD instincts in the face of his superior firepower and give him the conversation he wanted. Only, it doesn't go the way he intended.

He tells her that he just wants the police's cooperation rather than the hostility they've been showing himn. She berates him for how much damage his antics have caused to the city over the recent months. In one recent incident, his interdiction of a getaway car caused a ten car pileup that left several people - including one of her best officers - in the hospital for probable months. If a few vehicles had hit each other just a little differently, there could have easily been deaths, and him self righteously murdering innocent New Yorkers is just blatantly stepping on her toes. To make matters even worse for Mitchell, he reacts in visible surprise when she refers to the wounded officer in the feminine.

When you can get idpol'd by the fucking New York City police commissioner, you know you done fucked up.

She demands that he turn himself in, or she'll start arming the cops with archaic weapons just so they can use them on him on sight. He flies away, confused and panicked, letting her make her own way back to ground level.

Cut back to the following year, now one month after Mitchell's mayoral inauguration and the failed assassination attempt. He's making another public appearance concerning his retention of the NYPD Commissioner.

She beat him across the face and threatened to kill him, and he took her on as a trusted advisor and confidante. It looks like the Great Machine's secret weakness is shonen logic.

Aside from the very sanguine portrayal of one of America's most systemically corrupt police departments (sadly, I'm not sure if you can expect better from a 2000's comic), this feels like it's trying to send a positive message. The same one that I walked away from the first issue with, about the appropriate use of force and when it is or isn't appropriate. Fighting street crime would be a waste of the Great Machine's powers even if it weren't for his habit of causing more damage than he prevents.

Honestly, I feel like being mayor is also a waste of his time and attention. Though at least it isn't actively harmful like his brute vigilantism was. I maintain that the CORRECT answer to what Mitch should do with himself is "be an emergency responder for major disasters that only the Great Machine can handle." We'll see if the comic takes that position eventually, but so far it seems to be, what with 9/11 being his one unsullied moment of glory so far.

Also, he makes a crack about how despite being a lifelong republican, Commissioner Angotti dresses like a Democrat. I guess the low-key sexism is something that still hasn't been wrung out of him, ah well. In her own little speech, Angotti says that in addition to her support of Mitchell's policy platform, she is one of the many New Yorkers who owes him a great debt of gratitude. Her husband works in the World Trade Center's south tower. Hmm. Yeah, I can see how that might have improved her opinion of Mitchell just a bit. Probably much moreso than their alleged policy alignment, considering his not-so-low-key Marxist sentiments and her being herself.

Back at City Hall, Angotti gives him what's implied to be the latest of many scoldings for how he handled the assassination attempt. She insists that her officers would have handled it just fine on their own, and that if he keeps using his powers while directly acting as mayor she'll arrest him herself.

The NYPD threatening the democratically elected mayor into not "stepping on their toes." What a far-out, fantastical premise. :/

Given how close that assassin came to actually gunning Mitchell down, I'm not at all convinced of her position. Maybe the comic doesn't want the reader to be as sympathetic to Angotti as it seemed at first.

Police issues aside, Mayor Hundred hasn't been having the easiest time keeping his administration in order. He's had multiple chiefs of staff quit on him since he took office just a few weeks ago, presumably as fallout of the attempted shooting and associated hysteria. A not insignificant percent of the population really does seem to think that Mitch is an alien, or at least possessed by aliens by way of that device that gave him his powers.

As he finishes up this tiresome talk with Angotti, his new Chief of Staff tells him that they have a bit of a crisis he needs to look at. It doesn't concern his administration or the police, thank god, but it's potentially worse than both those things for his career. Off to the Brooklyn Museum of Art!

On the drive there, the chauffeur complains about the city's inability to keep the snow off the streets. Mitchell wearily tells him that this is an unexpectedly harsh winter, and that the city just plain doesn't have enough snow ploughs and salters to deal with it; he's currently trying to afford some more of them without making the post-9/11 budget deficit even worse. Speaking of inane conspiracy theories regarding Mitchell, the driver seems to subscribe to, or at least entertain, a few of them.

So, people are blaming any and every weird thing that happens in the New York area on that device. Makes sense that they would, rightly or wrongly.

Also, looking at the records, historically the winter of 2001-2002 wasn't a particularly snowy one for New York, though there was an unusual ice storm in late January. What they're dealing with in the comic is around the right time period, but it sure as hell doesn't look like an ice storm so much as a persistent blizzard. This comic was written two years after the date depicted. The authors already had an anomalous weather event they could have had people blame on Mitchell or the device that empowered him. They chose to replace it with a fictional one.

This might not mean anything. But it might also be a hint that the chauffeur is actually right, and something weird is causing the snowfall. Whether that something is actually related to the device would still be unclear, but the location seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

Well, if this is the first hint of a major story arc about Mayor Hundred having to don the suit again to foil Mr. Freeze or Elsa or someone, we aren't going to get back to it for some time. For now, he has something much more inane to deal with over at the Brooklyn museum.

Deputy Mayor Wylie - the guy who helped Mitchel launch his political career in the previous issue - was invited to see an early showing of the museum's "thirty under thirty" exhibit of visual artworks from postmodernist-leaning young Americans. Mr. Wylie saw something in said exhibit that he knew the mayor had to deal with at once before tomorrow's public opening. One of the paintings has optics issues that...well, they kinda speak for themselves.

One of the museum curators decided to put it at the very end of the hall facing the entrance, for maximum effect.

Her defense of it is...unconvincing, to say the least.

The best part is when Wylie, a black man, asks the curator if the artist responsible for this monument to small liberal arts school cringe was at least black. That would make things SLIGHTLY better, and could potentially - with the right kind of publicity - be spun as edgy but acceptable, as a denunciation of pseudo-progressive hypocrisy by the black community. The curator's response is to get super defensive and start with the wild rhetorical flailing.

Not a denunciation of pseudo-progressive hypocrisy, then. Just an example of it. Maybe the artist herself could make a better statement in the work's defense than this curator, but unfortunately she isn't here to do so.

I'm not sure what the authors are trying to say by making the defender of head-lodged-deep-in-own-colon white liberal "allies" a half Indian woman. At least, I think she's supposed to be half? Her last name is "Barry," but she looks pretty Indian. Anyway, I don't know much about the racial politics of the American art world, so maybe there's a reason they did that.

Anyway, the big problem from Mitchell's perspective is that this exhibit only happened because of municipal funding. And, unfortunately, bong-brained art lady here ignored Wylie's urging and sent press kits out an hour ago, while Mitch was still dealing with his previous engagement.

I wouldn't be so blasé about this if I were in Barry's place. If her museum is heavily dependent on city funding, keeping on the mayor's good side is kind of important for her. Slashing their funding would both be a great way for Mitchell to condemn and distance himself from this in the public's eye, and an effective retaliation against Barry for not even pretending to play ball. That's the kind of thing that could easily cost her her job.

As Mitchell's head sinks into his hands as he tries to come up with a solution (and suppresses the urge to follow this lady back to her car and make it eat her, I suspect), we cut to a snowy street elsewhere in the city. A truck driver leans out the window of his vehicle and asks the mysterious hooded figure in the middle of the road to please get out of the way. The mysterious hooded figure draws a gun and shoots him without warning.

I'll bet that's Mr. Freeze or Elsa or someone who fired that gun. End issue.


This was surprisingly short. Just half the length of the debut issue. Still, there was a lot of substance here, and I feel like it leaned more toward the first issues strengths away from its weaknesses (though they remained present). I'm still not quite getting a handle on Mitchell's personality, though the "well meaning but flawed" essence is coming through clearly enough.

From what I'm seeing, I think the comic *is* going in the direction of politics having been a waste of Mitchell's unique powers. Superheroics of the classic "go look for some completely dehumanized petty criminals to terrorize" were a misapplication of his powers. Politics, meanwhile, is just a rejection of them, especially with the concessions he's letting the police union bully him into making. For all his good intentions, Mitchell doesn't seem like he can make all that much difference in the way the city is run. The mayor is just one man within a vast bureaucracy full of competing interests and institutional momentum. He might be the most powerful individual within that system, but that doesn't necessarily mean much in the grand scheme of things. Problems that seem like they should be easy to solve when you're looking up from the ground level turn out to be a lot more complicated once you're in office. Mitchell's powers got him the popularity he needed to win the election, but they don't give him any particular management, diplomatic, or policymaking skills. Even if he ends up being a very good mayor, he still will only have made a small difference. Meanwhile, the one thing he most assuredly CAN use to improve the world is being mostly left to rot.

This is all aside from the greater mystery of what that device was and where it came from, and whether or not he'll remain the world's only superhuman for long. The snowstorm may or may not be related to that, but something tells me that the gunman at the end very much is. It's a compelling mystery, and it effectively energizes and speeds along the story's line of philosophical questioning.

My biggest complaints are the same as before; some of the players seem caricaturistic in a "written by a 2000's white liberal" sort of way even when the comic is portraying them positively, and Mitchell's personality is kind of all over the place. My biggest compliments are likewise the same as before; it successfully engages with philosophical questions about the nature and use of power that most comics fail miserably at when they attempt it, and it does something interesting with the cape genre that I don't think I've really seen elsewhere. A good comic, but not quite a great one at least yet.