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THE FILTH #1 (Best of the Week!)
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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DC Comics/Vertigo imprint
Writer: Grant Morrison
Pencils: Chris Weston
Inks: Gary Erskine
Colors: Matt Hollingsworth
Letters: Clem Robins
Editor: Karen Berger
Price: $2.95 US/$4.95 CAN |
When it comes to Morrison's more unconventional work, I'm still something of a rookie. I sampled his Invisibles series a couple of times, and I just didn't care for it. Too inaccessible and out there. So I honestly didn't know what to expect from The Filth. It is weird, yes, but it's shocking and honest and imaginative. It's also a pleasure -- even a relief -- to see regular work from Chris Weston.
Greg Feely lives a lonely little life. He's a timid, anonymous little man whose only escape from the drugdery of the everyday is the company of his cat and an tulimately unsatisfying proclivity for pornography. And then one day, all that changed. Real but strange women approach him, and he soon discovers he's a part of a dangerous, psychedelic world that's superimposed over our own.
Weston's work has always boasts an awe-striking level of detail and realism, making him one of the most impressive new pencilling talents in comics today. But with Erskine's inks at play, those strengths seem even further amplified, if that's even possible. Hollingsworth's colors do the same. He reinforces the dreariness of Greg's life just as he uses bright, vivid colors to bring out the weirdness and wonder of intense neon world that's exposed in the latter part of the book.
Even with its bizarre, foreboding atmosphere, The Filth boasts a strong -- albeit weird -- sense of humor. "This is ninth gear. Faster than the speed of wall." Morrison also makes room for some psychological horror as well, as we meet a young woman in the book's who's lost her free will but not her heart. Her pain, her torture is expressed with chilling clarity.
In a lot of ways, The Filth reminds me of the The Authority. When that book launched, writer Warren Ellis captured our attention with not only his "widescreen" approach to super-hero comics, but with his imaginative and mature descriptions of the super-hero and sci-fi elements. Here, Morrison does the same, but he's applying it to an espionage/conspiracy theory type of story. He balances his surreal sense of imagination with an opening spotlight on the sullen side of humanity.
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