Ex Machina

On September 11, 2001, a man in a mask stopped United Airlines Flight 175 before it could crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. His name was Mitchell Hundred. The world called him the Great Machine. And the next time New Yorkers saw him, he was running for mayor.

Ex Machina is the Eisner Award-winning fifty-issue series by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris, published by Wildstorm/DC from 2004 to 2010. It’s a superhero story, a political drama, and a sharp examination of power — what it means, who gets it, and what happens when the guy who can talk to machines trades his mask for a mayor’s office.

The Great Machine Goes to City Hall

After saving the city on the worst day in its history, Mitchell Hundred discovers that public opinion is the most powerful weapon of all. He wins the mayoral race and hangs up the mask — but the job is never that simple. Vaughan used the premise to tell stories about urban politics, media manipulation, terrorism, and the limits of power, all filtered through Hundred’s sardonic, pragmatic voice. Harris’ hyper-detailed, photorealistic art grounded the story in a New York that felt documented rather than imagined, and his design for the Great Machine’s helmet remains one of the most distinctive in comics.

The series won the Eisner Award for Best New Series in 2005 and ran for a full fifty issues, ending in 2010 with a finale that committed fully to the politics over the cape. It’s the rare superhero comic that’s more interested in budgets than brawls — and it’s aging remarkably well in an era when everyone’s asking what superheroes should actually do.

The complete series is collected across multiple volumes — most completely in the Ex Machina: The Complete Series Omnibus, which gathers all fifty issues and four specials into a single hardcover from Penguin Random House. For readers who want their superheroes to think as hard as they fight, Ex Machina is essential — the story of the man who saved New York and then had to govern it.