Brian Vaughan has been around for a while, but in the last couple of years he's become much more prominent.  Y: The Last Man has done good business, and gained good reviews, for Vertigo.  Mystique performed better than expected for the X-books, and his run on Ultimate X-Men has got off to a promising start.

Ex Machina is his latest series, coming out from DC under the WildStorm Signature Series imprint.  Don't get me started on the multitude of WildStorm sub-imprints.  It's Homage, basically.  It's the story of Mitchell Hundred, formerly a somewhat amateur superhero called the Machine, who got elected as mayor of New York in 2002 thanks in large part to his intervention on 9/11.

That plot element is pitched quite nicely, by the way.  It's now far enough in the past that it's possible to reference these events without seemingly automatically crass and exploitative, and Vaughan wisely limits the difference that Mitchell actually made.  It's something that required cautious handling, and Vaughan pulls it off.

The idea of an ex-superhero as mayor of New York is a neat central idea, and it's almost surprising that it hasn't really been done before.  Mitchell's powers are low key enough that it doesn't come across as a story about Superman running New York; it's really more about a hero finding himself as a political success.  These sort of hybrid not-quite-superhero comics haven't been doing all that well in sales, but Ex Machina deserves to break the trend.  It's a solid idea, well written.

Tony Harris does a great job on the art, with a lovely character design for Mitchell's superhero costume.  This is meant to be a real world with one somewhat amateurish superhero in it, and Harris produces something that looks plausibly like Mitchell might have knocked it up in his shed.  The character designs and acting are well done, and the book flows nicely.

One point, though.  All writers have at least one annoying tic, and Vaughan is no exception.  In Vaughan's case, it's a tendency to write characters who break off from the story for no apparent reason simply to expound on some fascinating piece of trivia that Vaughan no doubt found in an almanac while he was writing the book.  Yes, it's quite interesting to know that if the mayor of New York dies, he's succeeded by the Public Advocate and not the deputy mayor.  But it's not got anything to do with the plot, and Vaughan is developing a clear tendency to shoehorn Interesting Facts into his stories.  (Y: The Last Man is particularly full of it, and the last issue of Ultimate X-Men featured a completely irrelevant exchange about the percentage of the population with extra ribs.)  There are worse tics to have, but it's something that's becoming rather obvious in Vaughan's writing.

That's a very minor point, though.  This looks like another promising title, and it's worth your time.

Rating: A

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