"Happy endings are bullshit.  There are only happy pauses."

So says Mitchell Hundred as he opens his narration of the last issue of Ex Machina.  I've never been a huge fan of the series -- I came to it late, and while I loved the supporting cast and Brian K. Vaughan's masterful manipulation of the comic book medium, I never really warmed to Hundred himself as a character.  The politics of the series also rubbed me the wrong way on a number of occasions, especially when it was difficult to separate the book's view from the characters'.

But after reading issues 1-49 and the specials in library trades and borrowed copies, I decided to buy the final issue.  I was genuinely excited to find out how it would end, because there was a lot I'd come to like about the book.  And then I read those opening pages, with their meta-commentary on comic books and narrative endings, and I knew it would be downhill from there.

I can't say this is a bad finale.  It's still a very well-written comic book.  And it's clearly the finale that Vaughan wanted.  Nothing is out of character or poorly executed.  But I have a fundamental problem with the attitude that happy endings are somehow "lesser" or more unrealistic than tragedies. 

Hundred claims that the appeal of superhero books is the fact that they never have endings, so there's always hope for something happier no matter what.  I can't argue with that -- the impermanence of death in comics is proof enough.  But superhero comics also have the opposite problem -- no matter how happy a character is, now matter how much growth and fulfillment they find, Ultron or Lex Luthor or an unhappy editor is always going to come along again to screw things up or send things back to square one.  An open-ended story is a double-edged sword that way.

But closed stories have a definitive choice.  They do not, as Hundred claims, necessarily lead to "Regret. Pain. Loss."  When a writer chooses to end a story at a specific point, it can be happy or sad or anything in between.  Life, with all its ups and downs and shades of grey, is not necessarily a tragedy any more than it's necessarily a fairy tale, and it's up to the writer to choose which mood to end on.  If the conclusion is the last we'll ever see of a character, ANY mood can follow them out.  So why be so miserable and bleak?  Why end things so hopelessly, with so many characters dead or emotionally destroyed or morphed into an alternate history Sarah Palin?

I'm not saying tragedies don't have their place.  I'm not even saying that this was the wrong place for that kind of story.  But it's not the kind of story I like to read, and I refuse to believe that means I'm naive and childish.