The First Hundred Days

[sawyl]

When Mitchell Hundred touches a funky fresh weirdness tucked away beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, he suddenly gains the ability to speak to machines and to dream up cool gadgets fit to make Batman drool. Trouble is, he's not all that good at being a superhero, despite his attempt to prevent 9/11, so he decides to retire The Great Machine and knocks vigilantism on the head in favour of politics.

Not, of course, that politics turns out to be any easier. After facing an assassination attempt, the new mayor gets caught up in a controversial art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art which features a racist portrait of Honest Abe. While he's attempting to deal with the flak from that, a snowstorm hits NYC and someone is out killing snow plough drivers. Maybe being a superhero wasn't so bad after all.

Ex Machina is a nice take on the superhero comic: it's not every day that your average comic book hero admits to being troubled by doubts about the merits of brute force — most of them seem to come from the to-hell-with-consequences school. It's also nice, given the tendency of most superheros towards tyranny, to see a hero going into politics for all the right reasons and generally doing the Right Thing, no matter how frustrated he may be by the process.