The Filth

This is one of the best stories Grant has ever written. Please resort to your non-linear, artistic, symbolic lobe when reading. If you do you will "get it". If you can understand THE INVISIBLES you will "get it". If you can appreciate DOOM PATROL you will "get it". If not, then buy it anyway.

Consider yourself warned--this is probably the most vile comic you will ever read. But that's the point. The whole thing acts as a vaccine, inoculating the reader against all the horror in the world. The Filth tells the story of Greg Feely, a sad middle-aged man whose only friend is his dying cat Tony. One day, Feely is told that he s actually Ned Slade, an elite agent of The Hand, a secret organization that sanitizes the world, ridding it of all the filth humanity remains unaware of. With The Hand, Feely/Slade encounters an intelligent virus named Spartacus Hughes, a synthetic porno actor with super-potent, jet black semen, and a homemade superhero. Feely/Slade soon learns that all is not as it seems and The Hand may be more sinister than he was first led to believe. What follows is a very touching human story of compassion and redemption that only Grant Morrison could tell. The Filth is not for everybody, but if you can stomach it, you just may find something special hidden among the gratuitous sex, death, and violence.

I purchased "the Filth" because I had heard that Grant Morrison was a good writer, so I wanted to get something fairly cheap and not part of a series. I bought this and was blown away. If "Total Recall", "Transmetropolitan", and a soft-core porn all procreated; this would be the offspring. It has the graphic violence and weird creatures of "Total Recall", the whole future shock aspect of "Transmetropolitan", and the -- well, I'm pretty sure you can infer what aspects are taken from the soft-core porn. On top of all that, it has very good writing and characterization. The artwork is amazing with some of the most beautiful 2-page splash pages I have ever seen. This book is also often laugh-out-loud hilarious. I whole-heartedly reccomend "the Filth" if you enjoy any of the things I mentioned above. P.S. Do not let your children read this, it is quite possibly the most all-around offensive comic I have ever read. There is lots of sex, violence, swearing, and even drug use.

Grant Morrison's 13 issue maxi-series, the Filth, is possibly the best piece of material to ever come from the strangely gifted, critically acclaimed writer. The story centers around Greg Feely, a man who wants to do nothing more than look at pornography and care for his ailing cat Tony. However, Greg soon learns that he is actually Ned Slade, a special negotiator for an organization called the Hand which cleans up the unhealthy variations and messes made in the world. Feely's search for his identity brings him across a talking communist chimpanzee named Dmitri who boasts that he killed JFK, an adult film star named Anders Klimakks whose black semen is made into a biological weapon by depraved director Tex Porneau, and brainwashed children which are nothing more than ants. The art by Chris Weston and Gary Erksine brilliantly capture the sheer weirdness of it all; perfectly capturing Morrison's characterizations. Beneath the intense graphic violence and sex, Morrison weaves a tale like a tree, branching out with ideas reminiscent of that of a Philip K. Dick story while challenging the confines of what is a comic book. The Filth is brilliant, shocking, and the best thing to come from DC's Vertigo imprint since Preacher and Morrison's own Animal Man, and is much like Alan Moore's Watchmen was almost twenty years ago: sheer comic brilliance that will be cherished for years to come.

So, one day, Grant Morrison decided to pen a creator-owned limited series that incorporated themes, raw ideas, and scenes from all of his previous best work. No, not JLA or New X-Men, but stuff from Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and The Invisibles. Cribbing liberally from himself, he spun out a typically disturbing psychedelic tale of paranoia, conspiracy and pornography. And does it work? Heck yeah, it does. The Filth strikes me as a re-imagining of the seminal series The Inivsibles. Bald bad-ass pervert protagonist? Check. Secret society controlling the fate of the world? Check. Bizarro organic cyber-punk psychedelica? Check. Kinky sex out the wazoo? Again, check. This time, Grant also throws some bones to his old Animal Man fans with some nice post-mod super-hero subplots. It's almost like he's winking at himself -- an early scene with characters stepping out of comic book panels so closely mirrors the stunning post-mod twists of his early DC work that you'll either find yourself laughing (at the blatent rip-off) or groaning (at the blatent rip-off.) So what makes this worth reading if it's so deriviative? Well, it's Grant, so the writing and plotting is superb, and the art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine really grabbed my by the proverbial curlies. More importanly to me, however, was the running subplot concerning Slade/Feely's relationship with his cat, Tony. As usual, I'll save you the spoilers, the rest assured that this part of the story grounds the fantasmagoric aspects, and serves as an odd little paen to the power of love in our completely messed-up world. It's the emotional center of the story, and adds some sentimental feeling to Grant's paranoid and scary work. Plus, I just love kitties myself. Pick this up, and read it twice... three times if you must. It's really that darned good.