When I first heard about the comic book "Ex Machina", I stopped paying attention too soon. I heard that the protagonist is a superhero who can talk to machines. And those do what he says instead of beeping and complaining about syntax errors and/or blowing their stack or.. Yeah, they just do what he says, like they understand. I rolled my eyes. Yeah, I understand that the very fact that I read superhero comic books... I understand that I'm not allowed to roll my eyes at one more goofy premise... But I couldn't help it. And I stopped paying attention. So I never caught on to the fact that the protagonist is also the elected mayor of New York City.
But then I did. (Amazon recommendations recommended the series to me, so I took another look.) And then I bought every old collection I could get my hands on. This is a fun comic book!
This is a fun premise for a comic book, as long as you don't take it too seriously, and this book doesn't. There's more crime-fighting than budget-balancing going on here. The book skims over urban issues without getting bogged down in details. Society changes, the city changes with it--and in this comic book, most folks are inclined to be reasonable. Yes, I said reasonable... in politics... hey, quit laughing at me! Yes, I guess I'm reading escapist literature for people who follow politics. Cut me some slack. It's just a comic book.
Labels: comic, mad science, urban morphology