The Filth
"The Filth" is a thirteen-issue limited comic series created by writer Grant Morrison and artist Chris Weston, published under the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics. This work is recognized as Morrison’s first creator-owned project following his influential series "The Invisibles." The narrative unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, portraying a dystopian world governed by a clandestine organization called the Hand, which serves as both a sanitation crew and secret police. The protagonist, Greg Feely, navigates a bizarre reality where he discovers his second personality, Officer Ned Slade, leading to a series of surreal and often grotesque adventures.
Thematically, "The Filth" explores concepts such as identity, societal decay, and the tension between optimism and pessimism. The story incorporates elements of personal experience from its creators, making it a unique blend of the autobiographical and the fantastical. Weston's artistic style, characterized by detailed photorealism and psychedelic imagery, enhances the comic's unsettling tone. The series has been noted for its dense subtext, provocative content, and its role in pushing the boundaries of mature storytelling in comics, though it has also faced criticism for its complexity and perceived incoherence. Overall, "The Filth" stands as a significant work in the landscape of adult comics, inviting readers to grapple with its challenging themes and unconventional narrative structure.
The Filth
AUTHOR: Morrison, Grant
ARTIST: Chris Weston (penciller); Gary Erskine (inker); Matt Hollingsworth (colorist); Clem Robins (letterer); Carlos Segura (cover artist)
PUBLISHER: DC Comics
FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2002-2003
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2004
Publication History
Originally published as a thirteen-issue limited series by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, The Filth was the first creator-owned work written by Grant Morrison since the completion of his long-running, multi-volume series The Invisibles in 2000. Penciller Chris Weston has said that The Filth developed during a dinner with Morrison at the 2000 Comic-Con International: San Diego, where the two discussed a shared desire to “create the weirdest comic ever.”
Weston has identified as influences 1960’s British comic strip characters the Steel Claw and the Spider, 1967 marionette puppet show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and material from Morrison’s unproduced pitch for a reboot of Marvel Comics’ superspy character Nick Fury. One of the central ideas in The Filth, that superhuman espionage agents are artificial personalities injected into other people’s minds, is also found in the Morrison-written story “Nick’s World,” published in the second issue of the short-lived anthology series Marvel Knights Double Shot (2002). Some of the more quotidian elements of The Filth reference actual events from the lives of the book’s creators. The story incorporates time Morrison spent caring for his dying pet cat and Weston’s own experiences of being harassed by juvenile delinquents and having a cat with kidney problems. Much like the character King Mob in The Invisibles, protagonist Greg Feely shaves his head in the third chapter of The Filth, marking him as a visual avatar for the similarly hairless Morrison, while Feely’s facial features and poor posture make him a self-portrait of Weston.
Plot
The Filth is a nonlinear dystopian satire about the Hand, a shadowy sanitation crew/secret police force tasked with enforcing the existing social order, or “Status: Q.” Protagonist Greg Feely is a London bachelor and office worker who spends his free time masturbating to pornography and caring for his sick cat, Tony. Meanwhile, antagonist Spartacus Hughes kills scientist Dr. Li Soon and hijacks her invention, a small planet populated by microscopic artificial intelligence called I-Life. Hughes sells this “bonsai planet” to Simon, the world’s richest pervert, who purchases and desecrates things of beauty.
Officer of the Hand Miami Nil is sent to help Feely discover he has a second personality, that of Officer Ned Slade. Nil calls Feely a “parapersona,” an artificial identity Slade adopts as a vacation from work, but Feely has only partial memories of being Slade. Replaced by a doppelgänger, he travels with Nil to another dimension, the Crack, where the Hand is headquartered. Over an intercom, the Hand’s superior officer, Mother Dirt, orders the disoriented Feely/Slade to negotiate with Hughes and serve as a decoy while Comrade Dmitri-9, a superintelligent chimpanzee sniper, shoots Hughes in the head. Hughes tells Feely/Slade the name “Max Thunderstone” before dying. Feely/Slade resigns from the Hand.
The third chapter introduces officers Moog Mercury and Cameron Spector as they “inkdive” into the “Paperverse,” a two-dimensional superhero comic book universe the Hand creates, where they mine for outlandish technology. Feely/Slade returns to London, keeping his doppelgänger tied up and locked in a closet because he neglected Tony. Dmitri-9 visits the apartment to convince Feely to return to the Hand as Slade. A neighbor mistakes Dmitri-9 for a child and suspects Feely of being a pedophile.
As Ned Slade, he leads Miami Nil, Dmitri-9, Cameron Spector, and Moog Mercury on various missions against threats to social hygiene. Slade kills Doctor von Vermin, a homicidal rogue agent of the Hand with a superhuman sense of smell. Slade’s squad also stops a plague of giant killer sperm released on Los Angeles by hardcore-porn director Tex Porneau and neutralizes a hyperfertile porn-star clone named Anders Klimakks.
The police arrest Feely for pedophilia, also mentioning terrorism and Max Thunderstone, but his squad rescues him from custody before any more can be learned. Slade and the Hand take down the population of the Libertania, a nation-sized ocean liner whose inhabitants are driven to violent insanity and cultish compliance by a resurrected Spartacus Hughes. Dmitri-9 kills Hughes a second time.
Feely/Slade returns to London and finds Tony dead from the doppelgänger’s neglect. Cameron Spector takes Feely/Slade on a tour of the Hand’s operations while he mourns his cat. Spector introduces him to Man Green/Man Yellow, the director of the Palm, who exists outside of linear time. Spector also tells how the Paperverse was created, using ink taken from a giant fountain pen held by a giant hand that exists in the world of the Crack. Back in his London flat, Feely/Slade finds Sharon Jones, a woman once enslaved by Simon and now a “bio-ship” piloted by I-Life. The I-Life resurrect Tony.
Chapter 10 introduces Max Thunderstone, who has made himself into a real-life superhero with radical medical procedures and a coterie of internet operatives, including Feely, who discovered the Hand. Thunderstone plans to reveal the Hand and cast the members of the group as supervillains he defeats, thereby drawing converts to his religion of violent pacifism, Buddhismo. Thunderstone steals a Hand garbage truck and travels to the Crack, only to be subdued by a group of Hand operatives led by Slade.
In London, Feely/Slade sends Jones and Tony away and provokes the Hand. Dmitri-9 arrives at the flat to kill Feely/Slade but kills the doppelgänger Greg Feely by mistake. Feely’s neighbors, thinking Dmitri-9 is a monster, chase him into the path of an oncoming train. In the Crack, Nil discovers that Hughes, a parapersona originally created by Thunderstone’s people to sabotage the Hand, is now a Hand agent and controlling Max Thunderstone’s body. Feely/Slade breaks into a pharmacy, where Nil and Spector confront him. Feely/Slade shows them vials labeled with their names. Hand officers are revealed to be the parapersonas; Ned Slade is the artificial identity, not Greg Feely.
Feely finds Sharon Jones dead, killed by Spartacus Hughes. Spector arrives to help Feely fight Hughes, and the battle takes them into the Crack. They manage to kill Hughes, but Spector dies in the process.
The story returns to Feely’s home in London, where he overdoses on sleeping pills and falls while writing his suicide note, knocking over his trash can. Feely’s hand is revealed to be the giant hand holding the fountain pen, and the garbage from his trash can is the location of the microscopic world of the Crack.
Prior to his suicide attempt, Feely storms the office of Mother Dirt, who is revealed to be a giant fleshy mass of primordial muck. Feely is then shown in London, having become another bio-ship piloted by I-Life, which prevented his suicide. The I-Life use Feely to heal a young man in a vegetative state and grow flowers out of garbage.
Characters
•Greg Feely, a.k.a. Ned Slade, the protagonist, is a middle-aged, balding civil servant whose love for his cat, Tony, helps him defy the Hand’s attempts to recycle him into the artificial identity of Ned Slade. The Filth leaves open the possibility that the entire story is Feely’s delusion.
•Spartacus Hughes is a destructive viral parapersona identifiable by the muttonchops that grow on his host body. He is created by Feely and other operatives of Max Thunderstone to undermine the Hand. However, the Hand later recruits him by giving him Thunderstone’s body and sending him after his creator.
•Miami Nil is an officer of the Hand tasked with bringing Feely, and later Hughes, to the side of the Hand through sexual persuasion. During one case, she kills porn director Tex Porneau with his own giant killer sperm.
•Sharon Jones is a corporate lawyer kidnapped by Simon, the world’s richest pervert, and turned into a remote-controlled cyborg. She later becomes a bio-ship piloted by I-Life and resurrects Feely’s cat.
•I-Life are artificially intelligent microscopic robots created by Dr. Li Soon to cure diseases. After Spartacus Hughes incites their small planet’s destruction, the I-Life begin to travel through human bodies.
•Cameron Spector is an officer of the Hand and member of the Science Gestapo, a group that steals technology from the Paperverse. She later turns against the Hand because her terminal cancer is accelerated by her time in the Crack. She is one of several Morrison characters whose Scottish accent is represented through phonetically written dialogue.
•Moog Mercury is a member of the Hand’s Science Gestapo who writes story lines for the superheroes living in the Paperverse, encouraging the development of bizarre technology. When his recklessness kills a major superhero, he is reassigned to Ned Slade’s special squad.
•Dmitri-9 is a chimpanzee and former cosmonaut who acquired superintelligence from cosmic radiation and was made into the ultimate assassin by the Soviet Union. Dmitri-9 was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
•Maxwell Shatt, a.k.a. Max Thunderstone, is a lottery winner who uses his fortune to sculpt his muscles and mental prowess to superhero perfection. He eventually overcomes his agoraphobia to fight Hand officers, only to have his body co-opted and used by the Hand.
•Mother Dirt, the mysterious leader of the Hand, is a Lovecraftian wall of tendrils, giant insect parts, human organs, and other biological characteristics. She lives in a primordial environment and intimates she is foundational to all existence.
Artistic Style
Weston has described Morrison’s script as a “love letter” to his art, with the comic conceived by the writer as a return to the more bizarre and psychedelic imagery of Weston’s earlier comics, particularly those appearing in the long-running British anthology series 2000 AD in the late 1980’s. Weston spent a year apprenticed to renowned strip cartoonist Don Lawrence and shares Lawrence’s talent for detailed photorealism, which is inked with the clean, controlled lines and precisely curved hatching of inker Gary Erskine.
In addition to cementing the believability of the strange narrative world, Weston’s art is of a visual style that, to a certain extent, defined mainstream British comics of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Using this classic aesthetic to illustrate transgressive imagery heightens the uncomfortable, sordid tone of the book. Matt Hollingsworth’s digital colors have the dispassionate, unflattering brightness of fluorescent lighting, further adding a disturbing realism to the unreal depravity on display.
The clean, iconic, typographic cover illustrations by Carlos Segura contrast with The Filth’s pornographic, taboo, and morally debased content. Segura’s references to institutional signage, medical diagrams, and consumerist labeling resonate with the story’s overarching critique of twenty-first-century living.
Themes
Though The Filth and The Invisibles share similar themes, Morrison has described the unrelenting scatological and pornographic imagery of moral debasement in the former as the inversion of the glamorous counterculture of the latter. He has also described the limited series as a metaphorical inoculation, injecting the reader’s consciousness with diseases to strengthen the psychic immune system and prepare it for a twenty-first century characterized by ubiquitous surveillance and consumerist excess. The five departments that make up the Hand are modeled after five cells in the human immune system, and Spartacus Hughes is a virus. A practicing magician, Morrison has also identified The Filth as a meditation on the kabbalistic symbol of the Qliphoth, the negative side of existence, the Tree of Death that counterpoints the Tree of Life.
The Filth is also characterized by Morrison’s interest in postmodern self-reflexivity, William S. Burroughs-inspired nonlinear storytelling, and the malleable multiplicity of identity. The series builds on Morrison’s view of the universe as a single organism in which humans are cells, performing functions required by that unified system. More broadly, The Filth is concerned with cyclical tensions between optimism and pessimism, life and death, transcendence and degradation, and growth and decay. These inescapable contradictions are visually encapsulated by the image of a farting flower in the final panel.
Impact
The Filth was well-received by critics for its dense subtext but frequently critiqued as confusing or incoherent. Segura’s covers garnered praise for their simple, eye-catching design. As a publication of DC Comics’ mature-readers imprint, Vertigo, The Filth was largely uncensored, with Morrison reporting a single expurgated panel. Pushing the boundaries of comics, The Filth, along with other works for adult readers, has served to further open the medium to a wide range of mature situations and themes.
Further Reading
Ellis, Warren, and Darick Robertson. Transmetropolitan (1997-2002).
Fraction, Matt, and Gabriel Bá. Casanova (2006-2008).
Morrison, Grant, et al. The Invisibles (1994-2000).
Bibliography
Morrison, Grant. “A Healing Inoculation of Grime: Grant Morrison on The Filth.” Interview by Matt Brady. Newsarama, March 7, 2003. http://www.crackcomicks.com/the‗filth‗questions.htm.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Interview with an Umpire.” Interview by Brother Yawn. Barbelith Interviews, September 2, 2002. http://www.barbelith.com/old/interviews/interview‗5.shtml.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “One Nervous System Passage Through Time.” Interview by Jay Babcock. Arthur 12 (September, 2004). http://www.arthurmag.com/2007/02/01/interview-with-grant-morrison-from-the-pages-of-arthur-magazine.