EX MACHINA #50
Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artist: Tony Harris

*If you don’t want SPOILERS, why the hell are you reading this review of a final issue? Seriously.*

Even though this series’ ending had been telegraphed since the first page of the first issue, I was happy to be surprised by the direction taken in the final issue. “Happy endings are bullshit,” Mitchell Hundred says, and we then get 48 pages reminding us that real life doesn’t play out the way it does in the superhero comics. Real life is messy.

Columnist Matt Taibbi once described people’s proclivity for conspiracy theories as a way of revising reality when we don’t like the story it tells. He said that the gray complexity and general messiness of life – its dangling unanswered questions, its unresolved problems, and its sometimes unsatisfying answers – just isn’t sexy enough for some people, so they rewrite it. Reality fan fiction, so to speak.

EX MACHINA #50 is about that gray, complicated messiness. As we open the issue, we find Mitchell Hundred not in a government prison or interrogation room as we had assumed from the series’ first panel, but having a chat with the only friend he still has from his old life: a battered old jetpack. Mitchell may have held off an invasion from another Earth and saved his own ass politically, but he’s managed to lose everyone else.

The last issue steps on the gas and gives us a warp speed tour of the four years following the end of Hundred’s term as mayor, and how his selfishness and ambition cost him all of the major relationships in his life. In both his last conversations with Bradbury – who threw himself under the bus to save Mitchell’s political career – and with Kremlin – who thinks he can bring back the Great Machine with blackmail – Hundred’s motivations seem entirely self-serving. Notice that even set against the backdrop of his oldest friends’ lives falling apart, Hundred thinks first about how their situations can hurt his own presidential ambitions.

In many ways, I find myself comparing Mitchell Hundred to Charles Foster Kane. Hundred is a man who has grown up as a son of old school political idealism and comic book heroics, only to jettison his soul by degrees. He’s been abandoned by all of the friends of his idealistic past and living alone in the very symbol off which he built his political life. He even gets a last-page “Rosebud” moment before the last fade to black.

He’s also developed a Lex Luthor-esque notion that the only way to save the world is to be the man in charge of it. To protect his power, he murders the last person from his old life who still thinks he’s capable of doing real good in the world.

The twist at the end made me smile, too. It reminds us again that Hundred’s world diverges from our own in more places than just September 11th, 2001. It also does my heart good to think that somewhere in the multiverse, Sarah Palin is still a little-known governor who never stumbled onto the national political scene. It makes me long to hop on the Flash’s Cosmic Treadmill.

It’s going to be really hard to say goodbye to this series. It’s been a chocolate and peanut butter marriage of two things that I love – politics and superheroes. It’s a tragedy that this combination usually leads to vapid, spineless crap like DC UNIVERSE DECISIONS or to the subtlety and depth of a Chick Tract. EX MACHINA was different in that it had intelligent characters speaking about topics as wide-ranging as the death penalty and same-sex marriage and sound like actual people, and not text books or straw men. This book was both smart and funny. It had complex and flawed characters. The art was frakking gorgeous. The new issue racks will be all the poorer for its absence.

MIKE’S RATING: 5/5

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