"Ring Out The Old" (part 3)

Ex Machina #43 is an example of how a close reading of an issue can make the difference between a good story and a great one.

Even taken at face value, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. Tony Harris’s artwork seems more detailed than ever, with a particular emphasis on creating different textures, and there’s a heavy use of black areas on certain pages that works to create a dark, foreboding atmosphere. There are some fun visual Easter Eggs for readers to spot, such as the repository of the White Box, which is reminiscent of the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Harris’s visual characterization also remains strong, with many of the book’s most important scenes owing as much of their emotional impact to his characters’ facial expressions and body language as to Brian K. Vaughan’s script.

Vaughan is no slouch, either. The book’s opening scene is a great superhero set-piece that shocks readers into giving the book their full attention, initially making it unclear as to whether it’s a fantasy sequence or a real flashback from one of the Great Machine’s past adventures. There are more titbits for lovers of politics and political history, as Mayor Mitch Hundred discusses the history of sanitation and rat infestation in New York. And there’s the apparent return of the Great Machine’s arch-enemy Pherson in a creepy scene that implies that he may truly believe that he’s been to Hell (or Heaven?) and back.

I enjoyed all of these elements the first time I read the issue. However, once I considered the book in more depth--and began to connect details of this story to those of previous arcs--I enjoyed it even more.

Some of the details of the story are subtle enough that I missed them the first time that I read the issue, only picking them up on a second read. At first, I wondered why Vaughan would make such a big deal of the final page reveal of Mitch’s new costume, given that it’s a fairly unassuming and generic design. However, I later realised that it’s virtually identical to the futuristic costume that we saw in issue #11, in which a fortune teller predicted that Hundred would “disguise himself again” before the end of his time in office. Hundred also looks as though he’s going to be making use of the purple-and-green ray guns that we first saw in the “Tag” arc--a colour scheme that connects the powers of the Great Machine to those of Pherson, since those colors are also used for the characters’ speech balloons.

The version of Pherson that we see in this issue also evokes elements of a previous story arc, in which it was heavily implied that the world of Ex Machina was being visited by travellers from other dimensions. Could this be an alternate version of Pherson, rather than the original? His diving-suit outfit certainly seems similar to that of Zeller from “Power Down”.

There’s also another playful suggestion that Mitch might be gay, as he reveals tender feelings for Bradbury in his farewell message to Kremlin towards the end of the issue. Vaughan has been careful to never commit to Hundred’s true sexuality one way or another over the course of the series, and this is another example of the writer maintaining that ambiguity without making it the focus of the book.

Most interesting, though, is the subplot involving the “White Box”, a device that readers have been gradually learning about over the course of the last few issues. This issue connects Mitch and Bradbury’s use of the White Box to a date: November 6, 2001. At first, I brushed this off as an arbitrary date that did nothing to shed any light on Vaughan’s mystery. However, when I looked it up and realised that it was the date of the New York mayoral election, it cast the story in a whole new light. Could Mitch have used his powers to fix the election that saw him crowned mayor of New York? Could this be what he’s referring to when he says, “There’s been a noose around my neck since the day I was elected”? The book still isn’t giving us any firm answers, but it seems like a distinct possibility, and one that could open up some very interesting possibilities for the book.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been wondering whether Vaughan and Harris really had a solid plan for this series, or whether they were coasting towards a conclusion in issue #50 that didn’t really tie up any of the title’s long-running plot strands or answer any of the nagging questions that fans still have about the series. However, the many connections that I observed between this issue and previous Ex Machina stories are heartening, suggesting that the creators know exactly what they’re doing with the book.

I’ve been buying Ex Machina since the very beginning, keeping all of my issues in a longbox up in my attic -- and this is the kind of issue that makes me want to dig them all out and reread the entire series all over again. As Vaughan and Harris begin their build-up to the final issue in earnest, I want to be as informed as possible, so as to best understand the many connections that date all the way back to the beginning of Vaughan and Harris’s overarching story.

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