The Filth

I read The Filth as a complete bound collection, rather than the thirteen individual comics issues. In that format, it amounts to probably my favorite graphic novel. It includes science fiction, satire, superheroism, sex, drugs, and violence. It's something like The Matrix reconstituted on the basis of a scatological rant from Antonin Artaud. It has a completely freestanding mythos, not dependent on any prior superhero or comics franchise, highly coherent when it's not completely mind-blowing. Despite its evident balls-out insanity, The Filth tackles serious issues and ultimately offers a sense of profound redemption.

I'm not an unequivocal fan of Grant Morrison's work: sometimes I find him indulgent and meandering. But when he hits his show more mark, he's awesome; and I've never read anything where he has hit it as hard as The Filth. Weston and Erskine's art is both surreal and gritty while strangely conventional, just the mix of H.R Giger, William Blake, and Joe Kubert that the story requires.

Edited to add: Morrison is on the record as having written The Filth as a companion piece to his earlier and longer series The Invisibles, even though there is no narrative continuity between them. There is certainly a lot of conceptual and thematic overlap. They can be seen as perfectly complementary, though, if viewed through the cops-and-criminals dichotomy that each eventually collapses. The Filth works initially from the cop's end of the spectrum, while The Invisibles does from the criminal's. show less

I read and loved We3 when I first started giving comics serious attention. Since then, everything I've read from Grant Morrison has made me think that he's just Not For Me.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

That, or I might sincerely dislike him as a person. His books have increasingly left me playing spot-the-influence -- it's either Moore or Gaiman if we're talking comics, otherwise it's verbatim Robert Anton Wilson every time. He ticks all the boxes on the literary comics-writer checklist. He's transgressive to be transgressive. He breaks the fourth wall to break the fourth wall. He steals from Lovecraft because, honestly, who doesn't? Everyone sounds like Grant show more Morrison -- identifiable only by catchphrases: one will say 'dude' a lot, another 'fuck' every sentence, a third 'honey,' &c. -- and half the heroes are Mary Sues. Deep essays on Freudian psychology are dropped as if Freud wasn't discredited 40 years earlier. He's classically-pretentious in playing the teacher-writer, but gets all his facts wrong and misquotes all his words of wisdom -- this is made worse in that half the dialogue are the characters (i.e., Grant Morrison) lecturing to each other and the reader about how the world works. He breaks new ground with an LGBT cast by having them all be walking 2-dimensional stereotypes who were abused into sexual deviancy -- but no worries, their deviancy is, like, totally hip and Zen. He even makes his introduction to a Transmetropolitan volume more about him and his wonderful influence rather than the comic he was introducing. And now I'm doing it, too! It's hard to write about a Grant Morrison product without talking about Grant Morrison.

The Filth is more of that. It drags society through a red-tinged, big-boob'd pile of garbage to point out that consumerism is bad. That's it. 13 issues of overcooked text accompanying surreal pictures of senseless gore and animal abuse and porn-gone-wrong and lots of phallic purple imagery to say the same stupid thing all the Chuck Palahniuks of the world have been saying for 30 years. show less

This is what art can do. Hang on tight, and get ready to be disturbed, disgusted, and delighted. I'm not sure if I "enjoyed" this comic, but I was riveted. Take all the things you notice that Grant Morrison does differently from other story tellers, distill them down, and put them into one blisteringly weird comic.

After being blown away by Grant Morrison's "Nameless" I was very much looking forward to "The Filth" with great curiosity. however while i was pleased by some of the initial sci-fi elements and questions concerning identity, in the end i was hugely disappointed in it overall.

by about a third of the way through this graphic novel collection it felt like the author was creating a long running joke in which the punchline was, "I can't believe you bought this tedious, nonsensical comic."

if the author's intent was to rub our faces in the idea that life vacillates between the pointless and the putrid he could surely have done it in one issue instead of 13, or less, and saved us all a lot of time and a bit of money besides, not to mention the show more trees cut down and the inks necessary to create this for the mass market. a facebook post or even a tweet from Twitter would have done the job better.

the art occasionally is interesting, but not consistently so, and not very often either. for the most part it becomes quickly repetitive, with each chapter increasingly feeling like ever more of the same. despite having many friends interested in psychedelic art and sci-fi and/or "mind-bending" stories i can't think of a single person i would recommend this to, unless they specifically asked me: "do you have anything that is sometimes interesting to look at but not worth actually reading -- i just want to kill 15 or 20 minutes flipping through something." and while The Filth would fit that bill, there are actually any number of books on my shelf with far more interesting art that would be a better use of their time. show less

Bizarre is an understatement for this. Grant Morrison's imagination has been let loose on these pages, and the result is confusing and fantastical yet oddly interesting and fascinating.

The first few issues are--what I like to call--"headbusters". You are dropped into the world without any hint of an introduction, and it's a damn wild ride right from the beginning. Then the strangeness intensifies, among other things, and you're confused as hell as to what is happening and whether it's happening for real or not.

The intensity of the freakish and grotesque imagery increases as the issue numbers rise, yet somehow I felt heavily invested in the characters, especially that of Tony, the cat. Strangely, the cat is the most important character show more in the book despite the story being told from another character's POV.

There's a lot to say about The Filth, but all I'll say is that it'll be something you will either love or hate. The first few issues can be severely daunting--I felt intimidated at first. However, give it a chance and it'll grow on you. show less

I wish I liked this more than I did, because I usually like Grant Morrison's writing. I think I see what it was going for and there were snippets where it made narrative sense, but it just never came together and left me with a feeling that it was in its own ass a bit too much. Likely was not for me, nor did I have the impression that it was written for me to enjoy. I'm cool with that. I wouldn't let it put me off reading anything else by the guy, but I can't help thinking this is what you get when someone gets to the point where no one wants to insult them by suggesting they edit their work for coherency.

Read it again, following up a discussion of author Grant Morrison's disappointing Return of Bruce Wayne.

To be frank, The Filth was even less coherent than I had remembered: a rambling tale that veers this way and that about a secret policing organization, a story that seems to be critiquing the mind-numbing violence, sexualization, and incoherence of consumerist culture by creating a consumable object that consists of mind-numbing, incoherent depictions of sex and violence. Its excited flaunting of the veneer of heteronormal sexuality is undermined by the fact that its depiction of women consists almost solely of Barbie doll figures (albeit occasionally bald as a Vulcan dominatrix).

There are meta-asides to comics as a form struggling show more to break through its own self-contained borders, in which the divide between drawn page and physical reality is crumbled and each bends slightly into the other. There's no particular logic to it, though, just a spew of ideas. Its apparent underlying critique of superheroism is undermined by Morrison's later and earlier fine execution of superhero comics.

The series' covers (when it was first published, as a baker's dozen of pamphlets), though, remain one of the best things a mainstream comics publisher has ever produced. Beautiful stuff. If only the storytelling enacted the rigor its wrapper promised. show less