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