Raging for the Machine

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2005.

As mayor of a sprawling, embattled metropolis, the boyish new jack with a knack for ruffling feathers and throwing establishment politicos into disarray decides to perform gay marriages, hurling caution into an oncoming storm of criticism and conventional decline-of-Western-civilization paranoia. But this brazen figure isn't San Francisco's flashbulb-friendly Gavin Newsom – who recently declared the battle over gay marriage America's "last civil rights struggle" in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner – but rather a humble engineering whiz by the name of Mitchell Hundred, who has shed his superhero persona as the Great Machine to become mayor of New York City.

It's not your run-of-the-mill comic book narrative, but then again writer Brian K. Vaughan isn't your usual DC Comics graphic novel scribe, nor is his latest dialogue-centric series Ex Machina conventional in the slightest. In fact, rather than spending his continuing series explaining at length how his hero the Great Machine can talk to any mechanical object and bend it to his will, Vaughan prefers to investigate the corruption, competition and, yes, mundanity that passes for civic politics in the city that real-life mayor Michael Bloomberg recently proposed nicknaming "The World's Second Home." That is, in a world that's looking more and more like a comic book every day, Vaughan would rather deal with issues and concerns that are more, to used an oft-abused term in all media, real. And that focus – on the real – has garnered Vaughan's Ex Machina a prestigious nod from the GLBT community.

Vaughan, of course, doesn't stop at gay marriage. His protagonist in Ex Machina is forced to navigate his way through everything from attempted bribes and murders to more tedious matters like too few snowplows and too many free-speech showdowns. In one scenario reminiscent of the Giuliani-era outcry over Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" or the unapologetic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Vaughan spends as much page time, if not more, on a conflict over a controversial portrait of Lincoln with the word "Nigger" scrawled across it than he does the Great Machine's various exploits, although he is the hero on which the comic is based. Which suits the writer just fine, thanks.

"I don't have anything against a classic superhero book," Vaughan says. "Right now, I'm doing Ultimate X-Men, for example. But the word 'hero' really does make me uncomfortable, and that is what Ex Machina is all about. Heroes are just these fictions that we create and impose on people. Everyone has flaws. That's what drama is to me. I just couldn't picture myself writing a Superman comic, although they are so many Superman characters and storylines that I love. But it just doesn't seem human to me."

"Local politics has always interested me deeply," Vaughan confides, "especially after living in New York for ten years. It's a lot sexier than politics at the national level. It is less that I have issues that I want to explore than the fact that politics carries so much good drama, and I love a good story. And there were so many of them to be told, when it came to New York's political scene. There are hundreds of superhero books on the markets, but few comics that are political thrillers."

Plus, gay marriage is an attention-grabber, to say the least. The hot-button topic has done more than garner disapproving press and rabid condemnation; it has fully galvanized the country and forced it to divide along ideological lines. Which is perhaps why GLAAD recently nominated Ex Machina as Best Outstanding Comic for the organization's Media Awards, which will commence over the course of three ceremonies in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in late March, April and June, respectively. Recognizing various segments of the media for their fair portrayal of alternative lifestyles and communities, GLAAD's Media Awards usually net the LGBT-friendly organization millions of dollars – and high-profile donors like Absolut Vodka, IBM, Wells Fargo and, believe it or not, Coors Brewing Company – all for the purpose of eliminating homophobia on the wires and airwaves.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com, while finding the time to rant for Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, AOL and others. His first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps, should be done by the time the War on Terrorism is over.

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