Sure, President Obama got his own Very Special Issue of Amazing Spider-Man, but last week the boss appeared (off-panel) in the latest issue of Brian K. Vaughn’s Ex Machina (issue #41, for those of you keeping score). For those who don’t follow such things, Ex Machina is a series about an NYC civil engineer, Mitchell Hundred, who undergoes a freak accident which gives him the power to communicate with (and control) machines. In the Ex Machina universe, Hundred is (more of less) the only superhero. He becomes a vigilante and, after meeting with only modest crime-fighting success, decides to un-mask himself and use the ensuing publicity to get elected mayor of New York. The series is mostly about Hundred’s term as mayor with the occasional bits of super-herodom sprinkled in. In the current issue, Mayor Hundred holds a press conference to announce that he’s (a) not seeking reelection and (b) instituting a massive tax increase-a 20 percent raise on property taxes, a surcharge on incomes over $200,000, with the top local rate bumping all the way up to 16 percent, and other assorted tax hikes. The mayor defends himself by quoting Adam Smith and claiming that capitalism is “a system I happen to firmly believe in . . . no matter what William Kristol may write about me.” It’s not a criticism of Ex Machina (a very good book, if not quite as great as Vaughn’s best work in Runaways) to note that Mayor Hundred is a common kind of political figure: He declares, over and over, that he’s uninterested in partisanship or politics or ideology. He ran as an independent and says that he’s simply interested in solving problems–doing what works. The thing is, like most post-partisans, what “works” for Mayor Hundred is mostly a mélange of liberal politics-astronomical taxes, the unilateral implementation of gay marriage, medical marijuana-with the occasional dash of libertarianism thrown in. Hundred is an interesting character, but his goo-goo pursuit of “unity” and post-ideological technocracy may not be such a great strategy in the real world.
