CityHallNews.com

Up in the Air… Up in the Sky… It’s the Mayor of New York?
Faster than a Supreme Court judge in quashing a transit strike! Able to debate school vouchers and support civil unions in a single bound!

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Except for a few—Abe Beame, David Dinkins, and, some would argue, Michael Bloomberg—New York has had quite a cast of characters and egos among its mayors.

To date—again, to date—none has taken it to the extreme and appeared in the Blue Room in a cape and tights. But who knows? Perhaps the day will come, if not at City Hall, then in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

For those too impatient to wait, there is “Ex Machina,” Brian K. Vaughn’s author-owned comic book. The monthly installments, of which there have been 20 so far, tell the tale of Mitchell Hundred, a man who looks vaguely like Gifford Miller, except for the web of mysterious green circuitry reaching out across his left temple. Hundred, you see, was a civil engineer on the city payroll called on to investigate a glowing green box beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in October 1999. When the box explodes, he is left with that green circuitry on his face, making for a sort of sci-fi version of Mike Tyson’s facial tattoo. Plus, he can order machines to obey his will.

In the world of Mitchell Hundred, superheroes exist only in comic books. Nonetheless, with the assistance of two friends, he puts together a costume and a mission, and begins tackling sticky situations across the five boroughs as a sort of anti-MacGyver, using his powers to turn his enemies’ weapons and vehicles against them. The son of a League of Women Voters volunteer, he takes calls himself “The Great Machine.”

"The fantastical element is at a deeper level, the level where Hundred takes more interest in an ongoing debate with his first deputy mayor about school vouchers than with reports of a supernatural hound roaming the subway tunnels."

“It’s how [Thomas] Jefferson described society,” Hundred explains later to a crusty man who seems to be the governor’s city liaison. In Disney’s “The Incredibles,” Mr. Incredible and the other heroes get out of the day-saving business because of their mounting property damage tabs. In “Ex Machina,” Hundred gets out because he becomes concerned that his exploits might lead to someone getting hurt, and because the police have dedicated themselves to hunting him down.

One public unmasking later, he is running for mayor, trying to parlay his newfound fame into elected office. With a jetpack strapped to his back, he reasons, he can only help one person at a time. As mayor, he could help the whole city.

“I’m done playing dress up, okay? At best I’ve been maintaining the status quo. At worst, I’ve been jeopardizing lives. I realize that now,” he explains.

Is there any member of city government who has not faced this same dilemma?

Running as an independent, Hundred is not gaining much traction against Bloomberg or any of the Democrats in the race. Though he has supernatural powers over anything technological, his campaign is firmly traditional and desperately under-funded—one panel shows his apartment turned into his campaign office, covered in signs with an admittedly catchy slogan: “100% with Hundred.”

Then comes Sept. 11th. Donning his gear one last time, Hundred gets to the Battery just in time to stop the second plane from hitting the South Tower, using his powers to override the mechanisms being forced into overdrive by the terrorists at the helm. He carries many of those trapped in the North Tower to safety, and presumably, these are just some of the people who vote for him, because come November, he, and not Bloomberg, is elected mayor.

That this is fantasy land is clear long before the still shocking final page of the first issue, which has a single tower of light standing alongside a single surviving tower. And it is not because of the Great Machine’s powers, which allow Hundred to do everything from gradually slowing the rotors of a rogue helicopter to causing automatic weapons to misfire to lowering the volume on his television in place of a remote control.

The fantastical element is at a deeper level, the level where Hundred takes more interest in an ongoing debate with his first deputy mayor about school vouchers than with reports of a supernatural hound roaming the subway tunnels. When transit workers are threatening to strike because of said hound, rather than any contract dispute about extended benefits, it is hard not to chuckle. Mayor Hundred dances through it all, even as the Council overrides his veto of the smoking ban, and rumors about his own sexuality swirl after he plays Gavin Newsom and performs a gay marriage at City Hall of a 9/11 firefighter and the political director of the Log Cabin Republicans.

“Screw the polls,” he tells his deputy mayor, who tries to prevent the move, despite being the brother of the firefighter in question. “This isn’t about doing what’s popular Dave, it’s about doing what’s right.”

Seeing that the firefighter is a hero, the mayor adds, “who’s going to deny his happiness?”

Wherever readers may themselves fall in this debate, or in any of the other debates Hundred has flitted into during his time so far as mayor (the most recent issue documents events supposed to have taken place on Feb. 18, 2003), it is more than a little jarring to see New York politics digested like this. Few political observers in this town would argue that our political process is always fast, streamlined or possessing a monogamous relationship with common sense. But few as well would be ready to see these complexities so nonchalantly stripped away in actuality, and stripped away so quickly at that. New Yorkers have short attention spans, but not that short.

Which politically inclined person won’t laugh at a comic book in which a former superhero talking about Pale Male, “Vote for Cuomo not the homo,” Rudy Giuliani serving jury duty, sandhogs, “waterfront trash transfer stations” and the mayor’s weekly radio show?

This begs the obvious question: who are these comic books intended for? Not children: the disclaimers on the back cover say “suggested for mature readers.” Indeed, the pages are strewn with a fair amount of cursing, and the occasional panel with a woman’s bare breasts. But which mature readers? Politicos have a curious habit of devoting time off the clock to fake politics, as shown by the number of movies, television shows and books there have been about imaginary presidents, mayors, congresses and even Supreme Court justices. And among the general public, there often seems more of a fascination with fake politicians than real ones, otherwise none of these would have ever met with success.

The fusion of insider and popular political entertainment can work, as “The West Wing” showed for most of its seven seasons on NBC. Sure, there was a whole episode devoted to the intricacies of the census and another one which featured staffers and candidates debating the merits of ethanol. But they also managed to negotiate Middle East peace—though that did take two episodes, and the Palestinian president eventually ended up assassinated.

If “The West Wing” is the gold standard for political drama, “Ex Machina” is perhaps the copper or tin standard. It does not compare, both because it does not seem to be attempting to and because it does not have the ability to. “The West Wing” was written with the consultation of many retired politicians and former staffers, whereas “Ex Machina” has the feel of being conceived by a smarter than average comic book author with access to a good almanac.

Still, there is something engaging about the diligence of the author, factual errors aside. This may be a world in which the deputy mayor’s children rejoice at switching out of Horace Mann because they will no longer have to wear uniforms, but it is also a world in which that same deputy mayor explains, on the 13th page of the very first issue, that not he, but the public advocate is next in line should the mayor die.

Which politically inclined person won’t laugh at a comic book in which a former superhero talking about Pale Male, “Vote for Cuomo not the homo,” Rudy Giuliani serving jury duty, sandhogs, “waterfront trash transfer stations” and the mayor’s weekly radio show? There is not much more to these comic books, or graphic novels, as they comport themselves. They were named “one of the 10 best fiction novels of the year” by “Entertainment Weekly,” which is a frightening statement about our culture (or last year’s batch of novels, or the copyeditor who let slip “fiction novel” or just “Entertainment Weekly” itself).

They are not great. But they are amusing, enough so to leave readers wondering where, in the minds of the “Ex Machina” creator, we would be today, after Mayor Mitchell Hundred’s years in office, which he says on the very first page ran from “the beginning of 2002 through godforsaken 2005.” (“It may look like a comic, but it’s really a tragedy,” he adds.) Aquaman for public advocate? Wolverine for comptroller? Mayor Bruce Wayne?

Come to think of it, Mayor Bloomberg does already have his own mansion, an immense fortune and a tendency to disappear on weekends… Have there been any reports of a short, flat-voiced caped crusader bumping off three card monte dealers on the beaches of Aruba?

Photos by Andrew Schwartz