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THE FILTH #1
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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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 |
Well, I've read it three times now, and I'm not entirely certain what's going on... but I'll be damned if I'm not fascinated. Morrison's stranger Vertigo work, like Doom Patrol and Invisibles, has never connected with me as strongly as his relatively straightforward work like Animal Man and New X-Men, and The Filth seems to be no exception as I found it a little bit too much like Morrison trying to be weird. However, there are undeniably plenty of very interesting ideas here, and the same sort of conspiracy reality that can be found in work like The Invisibles or The Matrix (although, depending who you believe, you
may think those are the same thing.) Not to mention that the artwork is
terrific, fully realistic but with a slightly off-kilter approach that's perfect
for the book.
Try to imagine that you're a
single, middle-aged man with all the stereotypical baggage that goes with that.
You pick your nose when you think nobody's looking, you live alone with your
cat, and your only joys in life are watching television and wanking to porn that
you were embarrassed to buy in the first place. The people around you are
clearly too young or too strange or too angry to befriend, and the world outside
your small apartment seems hostile and bizarre. Now imagine that you've found
out that you are in the middle of a conspiracy that is stranger and wilder than
anything that previously scared you about that outside world.
Not easy to imagine, is it?
However, Morrison and company do an excellent job of putting us first into the
shoes of Greg Feely and later into those of Officer Slade, an operative of The
Filth or the Hand (we're not sure what those mean yet). The tedium of Feely's
life comes through loud and clear in the small moments that we see, from the
life he lives as viewed by a black and white security cam to his rough day at
the office to his drab and sordid home life. We are brought right into Greg
Feely's world, which may be a little sadder than most of us are used to, but
it's pretty easy to relate to in terms of normality.
The same strength of
storytelling comes through when the book makes the transition into the weirder
elements of the story. Weston's imaginative designs perfectly capture the
strange, mildly erotic and disturbing feel of Morrison's alternate reality,
whether it's a naked woman with a balding man's comb-over, filthy sex in
technicolor, some very odd and ostentatious uniforms or a twisted personal
conveyance. The artists on this book needed to be able to convey the absolutely
static and boring real world, as well as the outrageous new world that Feely
steps into, and Weston, Erskine and Hollingsworth are well up to the challenge.
It's funny, I'm not even
entirely certain what's going on yet, or what motivates most of the characters,
but the more I think about this book, the more I like it. Time will tell whether
Morrison can weave all this enticing strangeness into a story, or if I will be
left scratching my head at the end of it, but at this point, I'm definitely
along for the ride.
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