Okay, reading The Filth just as you enter into a depressive state is probably the single worst idea I have ever had. The paricular Morrisonian take on Phillip K. Dick's tropes of isolation and identity including his usual flourishes, like finding a metaphor for identity in a kind of fluid that can be injected into a person or excreted out of them, a laboratory-grown porn star with pheremone-based influence and black semen that can be grown to use as man-sized weapons, a gigantic derelict vessel full of identity-vacant hordes, and a man who wants to be a super-hero... not to mention microscopic I-Life and the Hand that holds the Pen that leaks the Ink... perhaps Morrison hit my own temporal lobe Buddha button at the wrong moment, because when you meet the Buddha on the road you're supposed to kill him, not have him kill you.
There are a lot of wild ideas in The Filth but in the end, to my mind anyway, it's far less engaging and well-executed than Seaguy, which held a classical Gormenghast meets Lord Dunsany structural skeleton of whimsical fantasy that it built around and over. The Filth reads like Valis crashing headlong into comic books and each issue feels like the shockwaves of that kind of collapse, as though Soviet Cosmonaut Assassin Monkeys were rattling the cages of the Iron Prison House, but in the end we stay locked behind the bars and the Emperor is still on the throne. Seaguy promises a kind of tension between recursive and dynamic, whereas The Filth felt like being pushed face-first through the 'squicky bits' in an attempt to demonstrate that kind of tension. Like Max Thunderstone with his visible thoughts manifested in a cloud over his head, I find myself unable to find the 'enemy' if you would in this particular story... I'm not sure what in The Filth are the really gripping ideas that energize and drive the story and what's just re-heated tropes. For instance, Greg Feely/Ned Slade could well come straight out of A Scanner Darkly with its tale of Substance D, Fred, and Bob Arctor, but Morrison's an extremely clever bloke: is that deliberate, considering he calls this series his reaction to having gone out to L.A. and having had the city wash over him? It's hard to say... as I said, Morrison's an extremely clever bloke, even though at times, it feels like he wants you to know that more than he wants to tell a story.
I think what I need to do is sit down with both Seaguy and The Filth again and bounce them off each other. Yes, that's what I'll do, I think.
Posted by Matt Rossi at February 24, 2005 11:57 PM
I had the opposite reaction, in some respects. Yes, I didn't really understand The Filth, but I found it more approachable and more entertaining than Seaguy, which was too densely symbolic for me.
I am, however, pretty aggressively not highbrow.
"I think what I need to do is sit down with both Seaguy and The Filth again and bounce them off each other. Yes, that's what I'll do, I think."
Yes--a capital idea my friend!
I love them both--so you know I'll be here for that!
Dave
Greg - Well, they're both good, it's just that Seaguy seemed more original to me, whereas The Filth felt like several of the books on my bookshelf had exploded.
Dave - We'll see if I'm up to it.
I'm generally a fan of Morrison's creator-owned stuff (and his "mainstream" stuff, for that matter), and INVISIBLES and SEAGUY are two of my favorite works of his. Despite that, THE FILTH didn't really work for me. Individual elements--particularly Greg and his cat--resonated, but the whole thing never came together in my mind.
That said, I can appreciate the book more now that I've read some interviews where Morrison talks about his goals for the book. Matt, it sounds almost like you read it exactly as it was intended: as an "inoculation of filth."
http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20045.html
http://www.newsarama.com/Filth.htm
I should read the whole thing again at some point. I still don't think it'll completely gel with me, but I'd like to give it a shot with a new perspective.
I liked it - not just for the work itself but for the fact that Morrisson somehow managed to get one of The Big Two to publish a series that featured a hero who beats off to chicks with dicks mags, let alone the mutant sperm, Anal Quakers vids, death by strap-on AND the hand of god. Weston's art, part Dan Dare chic, part bad night at London's Rubber Ball, perfectly captured a world where every perversion was not only possible, but was in fact necessary for the continued reign of man at the top of the food chain, the whole, story and art, congealing like a drag queen's vomit on a hot summer's night pavement, all glitter, rancid spunk and unholy stink.
If only they'd let him REALLY do the X-Men...