Opinion

The Filth

Writer: Grant Morrison
Artists: Chris Weston and Gary Erskine
Published by DC/Vertigo

Where to start? There's a man called Greg Feely - ordinary bloke, bit sad and lonely, reads a lot of porn, talks to his cat, hears people talking to him in his head at the bus stop, finds a strange woman in his shower one day who gives him a blowjob and causes his entire 'para-personality' to drain away. Which means he's really Officer Slade of The Hand, and what The Hand are, and what they do, takes us into some *really* strange territory.

The Filth was set up with some very mysterious advance publicity that really served only to tease without ever really giving anything away as to what the book was 'about', and having actually now seen two issues I'm not sure how they could have done anything else.

Mysterious activities taking place all around us that we're conditioned not to see is a theme familiar from Morrison's work on The Invisibles, his last series from Vertigo, but here he's taken it to a whole other level: Issue 2's depictions of the microscopic I-Life culture and The Hand's headquarters draw on Morrison's apparently limitless capacity to generate original concepts like no one else currently working in mainstream US comics. That they're brought to life so brilliantly well by Weston and Erskine is a significant bonus.

Saying much more about The Filth is quite difficult, because I literally have no idea where it's going, or whether this level of work can be sustained over its 13 issue run. I have high hopes that it will be, though. I felt that towards the end of its run The Invisibles was losing its focus, and it was starting to annoy me. Keeping The Filth tight should hopefully avoid that.

This is absolutely not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you want to try something *completely* different, you could do a lot worse than give this one a try.