The Filth (comics)
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| The Filth | |
|---|---|
 Cover to The Filth #13. | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Vertigo |
| Schedule | Monthly |
| Publication date | August 2002 - October 2003 |
| No. of issues | 13 |
| Creative team | |
| Written by | Grant Morrison |
| Penciller(s) | Chris Weston |
| Inker(s) | Gary Erskine |
The Filth is a comic book limited series, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine. It was published by the Vertigo imprint of American company DC Comics in 2002.[1]
Publication history
[edit]The Filth was Grant Morrison's second major creator-owned series for Vertigo after The Invisibles. Initially starting as a Nick Fury proposal for Marvel Comics,[Note 1] Morrison adapted it as a 13-part series for Vertigo. The title refers both to the police (in British slang) and to pornography (in which Morrison "immersed" themselves while "researching" the series).[5] Morrison has said that the series is their favorite among their works.[6]
Plot
[edit]The series tells the story of Greg Feely, a bachelor whose main interests are his cat and masturbating to pornography. Feely is actually a member of a shadowy organization called The Hand and their attempts to keep society on the path to the "Status Q".
Themes and motifs
[edit]The Filth can be seen partly as a companion piece to The Invisibles in that it touches upon similar themes and concepts such as fractal realities, art affecting life, postmodern blurring of the fourth wall and the world as a single, living organism with humans as the cells that compose it. Morrison has stated that they had originally intended to make The Filth a thematic sequel to The Invisibles, followed by a third comic book series, The Indestructible Man.[7] Morrison later concluded that their original Flex Mentallo series formed the first in the trilogy.[8] Therefore, the sequence runs: 1. Flex Mentallo. 2. The Invisibles, 3. The Filth. The theme of The Filth consists of immersion into, and eventual redemption from, the forces of negativity.
Synopsis
[edit] | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (April 2008) |
Greg Feely is a "dodgy bachelor" who lives alone in London. Though he has no friends or family, and no hobbies beyond consuming trashy pornography, he cares deeply for animals such as his pet cat Tony. One day, he returns home from work to find an unknown woman named Miami Nil in his bathroom, naked and with a comb over hairstyle matching his own. Miami informs him that 'Greg Feely' is actually a chemically-induced "para-personality", and that he is really a secret agent called Ned Slade who works for a surreal extra-dimensional organisation known as the Hand (or, informally, "the Filth").[1]
At the Hand's headquarters, hidden within a surreal netherworld known as the Crack, Slade's enigmatic commanding officer Mother Dirt explains that the Hand as a cross between a secret police force and a waste disposal agency. Its purpose is to protect "Status Q" by suppressing all threats to "social hygiene": whatever is "sick", "bad", or "unnatural". Its agents, who range from talking dolphins to cabaret dominatrices, ride in flying dump trucks with giant gnashing teeth and wear bizarre outfits designed to deter public attention by reminding bystanders of their suppressed sexual urges. Slade has has been brought out of retirement to stop his old friend Spartacus Hughes, a former Hand agent gone rogue.
Despite his lingering amnesia, and misgivings, Slade deploys to the "hot zone" with Miami and Dmitri-9, a misanthropic former Russian chimpanzee cosmonaut and assassin. Hughes has taken over a laboratory housing an artificial microorganism called "I-Life", which was meant to heal diseases and protect human health but which now appears to have been weaponised. In the ensuing confrontation, Hughes implies that Slade is unaware of important information and declares that "anyone can be Spartacus Hughes", but is shot by Dmitri-9 before he can say more. Secretly, Slade takes some of the I-Life home in a fish bowl to look after it.
Receiving no answers from Mother Dirt, Slade quits and goes back to being Greg Feely. Nevertheless, the Hand repeatedly forces him back to work. In the monster-infested wastelands of the Crack, where time moves so quickly that anyone not wearing a protective suit will die of old age within minutes, he exposes a corrupt Hand inspector as a serial killer. In Los Angeles, he stops megalomaniac pornographer Tex Porneau (based upon real life porn director Max Hardcore[9]) from destroying womankind with giant mutant sperm. Both cases involve so-called "anti-people", human beings designated by the Hand as a threat to Status: Q.
Meanwhile, Feely's home life deteriorates. The Hand doppelganger who takes his place while he's away has been deliberately neglecting his cat Tony, making him sick. The doppelganger's suspicious behaviour has also led Feely's nosy, small-minded neighbours to believe that he is a paedophile and a child murderer. Eventually Feely is arrested, only to overpower the police using Slade's martial arts training. While on the run, he finds a tampon in a puddle with the words "help us" written in blood. Soon the police catch him again, but are stunned when the Hand – which they had assumed were a figment of his psychosis – turn up to remove him from custody.
Aboard a city-sized cruise ship transformed into a violent dystopia by a mysteriously resurrected Spartacus Hughes, the two men confront each other once again. Hughes tells Slade that he became an anti-person after seeing "too much dirt" during as a Hand agent, but is once again shot by Dmitri before he can explain. Afterwards, touring the Crack with his new teammate Cameron Spector, Slade learns that the Hand gets its name from a vast, literal hand holding a fountain pen that dominates the landscape, but gets few concrete answers. Back in the ordinary world, Feely finds that his doppelganger has allowed Tony to die, and becomes convinced that the Hand is deliberately destroying his civilian life to keep him under control. He also meets a woman whose body is being "piloted" by some escaped I-Life – apparently the authors of the tampon message – and reunites them with their comrades in the fishbowl.
As Feely's mental state spirals, the Hand comes under attack from a self-made, self-declared "superhero" called Max Thunderstone. Thunderstone sees the Hand as a "gang of Orwellian monsters" and has been secretly leading a group of friends in rebellion against them. Slade neutralises Thunderstone, accusing him of creating Spartacus Hughes as a parapersona in order to destabilise Status: Q. But Thunderstone reveals that that Greg Feely was originally one of the rebels, and was the person who discovered the Hand's existence.
In a rage, Feely takes his doppelganger prisoner, force-feeds him cat food, and finds and destroys several Hand surveillance devices in his home. The Hand brands Feely as an anti-person and sends Dmitri-9 to kill him, but Dmitri accidentally kills the doppelganger instead and is forced outside by Feely, where he is chased and ultimately killed by a mob of Feely's intolerant neighbours. With Dmitri's gun, Feely storms a local chemist's shop and discovers a hidden Hand storehouse, containing countless alphabetised parapersonas. When Spector arrives to talk him down, he shows her the truth: Greg Feely is the real person, and Slade – like Hughes, Spector, and all Hand agents – is a synthetic character who can be installed in any body the Hand chooses. "Death to Status: Q," Feely declares.
At Slade's apartment, Feely and Spector find the I-Life's host body has been murdered by Spartacus Hughes, now installed into Max Thunderstone and working for the Hand. After a desperate chase, they manage to kill him by using a Hand dump truck to strand him in the Crack, but before dying he breaks the truck window and briefly exposes them to the Crack's super-fast timestream. Spector reveals that she has cancer and was only given six months to live. Her disease rushes to its agonising end, until a distraught Feely ends her suffernig.
The storytelling now becomes non-linear and ambiguous. Back in his home, perhaps simultaneously or perhaps later, Feely writes a suicide note, saying the police told him that he killed Tony with his own neglect and imagined the Hand as a coping mechanism. Officers knock on his door, but he has already overdosed and falls to the floor before he can answer. In front of him, he sees his hand stretching out across the kitchen floor, holding his fountain pen. He realises that the giant hand he saw in the Crack is his own, and that the Crack itself is a microscopic environment existing on his kitchen floor at this specific moment in time.
Feely blasts his way through the Hand's headquarters towards Mother Dirt's sanctum. Miami confronts and cools his rage, warning him that to destroy the Hand would be to destroy the world's immune system. Nevertheless, Feely enters Mother Dirt's chamber and finds a superintelligent mass of primordial compost-like material. Feely admits that he doesn't know how to make sense of the world, or what he has lost, or how to make things better. Mother Dirt offers him part of herself, suggesting he spread it on his flowers.
In an epilogue, Feely has survived his suicide attempt, although his life is in ruins. He has become a carrier for the I-Life, which he credits for his survival, and now he quietly wanders the world healing people that he meets, while flowers bloom in his wake. The final page depicts him walking away into an underpass, seemingly to meet with a reincarnated Tony.
Collected editions
[edit]A trade paperback of all 13 issues was released in 2004 (ISBN 1401200133).
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ Said story eventually became Nick's World.[2][3][4]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Irvine, Alex (2008), "Filth", in Dougall, Alastair (ed.), The Vertigo Encyclopedia, New York: Dorling Kindersley, p. 83, ISBN 978-0-7566-4122-1, OCLC 213309015
- ^ "The Unpublished Grant Morrison - Marvel Comics". Deep Space Transmissions. Retrieved 2018-01-20.
- ^ Darragh Greene, Kate Roddy (2005). Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance. McFarland. p. 127. ISBN 978-0786478101.
- ^ "Grant Morrison". Comic Book DB. Retrieved 2018-01-20.
- ^ Grant Morrison: Master & Commander PART 5: Dancing Through Shells Archived 2008-02-03 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Up, Up and Away with Morrison, Kring, Mignola & Lethem, Comic Book Resources, October 8, 2007
- ^ Hector Lima (2003-08-07). "Catching up with Professor M: Talking with Grant Morrison". comicbookresources.com. Comic Book Resources. Retrieved 26 September 2012.
- ^ Brown, M., "The New Age of Morrison", ComiX-Fan, May 18, 2004
- ^ View Askew: Grant Morrison (cached), Newsarama
Sources
[edit]- The Filth at the Grand Comics Database
- The Filth at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)
External links
[edit]
- Curing the Postmodern Blues, a book by Tom Shapira on the series (has unpublished art by Weston and interviews with Morrison, Weston, and Erskine)
- The Filth discussed at ninthart.com (via archive.org)
- Grant Morrison interview at popthought.com
- Filth Review at PopImage