{"id":2341,"date":"2010-09-09T07:48:44","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T13:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=2341"},"modified":"2010-09-09T07:48:44","modified_gmt":"2010-09-09T13:48:44","slug":"ex-machina-ring-out-the-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=2341","title":{"rendered":"Ex Machina: Ring out the Old"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So it turns out I was wrong about <a title=\"My review of Ex Machina: Dirty Tricks\" href=\"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=1539\" target=\"_blank\">which<\/a> was the penultimate volume of the Ex Machina series. But, since the series is now over in monthly publication form, I can definitively state that <a title=\"Ex Machina Vol. 9: Ring out the Old by Brian K. Vaughan, at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ex-Machina-Vol-Ring-out\/dp\/1401226949\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ring out the Old<\/a> <em>is<\/em> next-to-last. Superficially, it has the same structure as all the books: Mayor Hundred addresses a political issue (environmentalism!) while at the same time a piece of the puzzle of his past and the mysterious powers he&#8217;s been granted is revealed. The big difference is that Vaughan finally noticed his story was nearly over and picked up the pace on the latter portion. I can&#8217;t help but wonder whether the pacing would look right if I read the series all as a piece, but at the same time, the series has been released piecemeal (in two different formats) over the past few years, so there&#8217;s only so much credit I could give to that possibility even if it were factual. It&#8217;s not that it was a bad story, but since I&#8217;ve spent all this time wondering what was going on only to see it all finally revealed in a chunk at the end, mainly I&#8217;ll be glad it&#8217;s over. I guess I had a journey fail, here.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, but the initial story in the book before all that I just mentioned, about Hundred&#8217;s biographers? That was just shameless self-indulgence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So it turns out I was wrong about which was the penultimate volume of the Ex Machina series. But, since the series is now over in monthly publication form, I can definitively state that Ring out the Old is next-to-last. Superficially, it has the same structure as all the books: Mayor Hundred addresses a political [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,22],"class_list":["post-2341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-graphic-novel","tag-superheroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}