I’ve got a few days (weeks?) of idleness before my Social Security number comes through and I get a job. I’m planning to use them well. I chomped through most of the Filth today, which I have on loan from Kelvin. I read the first few last year and was very impressed (mostly because it has quite a high tits and arse quotient if I’m being truthful) and I’m as impressed and even more confused having read to the end. Grant Morrison has lots to say about abjection and society’s approach to transgressive behaviour and he says it as luridly as possible. Greg Feely is a confirmed bachelor with a comb-over, a ginger cat and a sizeable collection of porn under the mattress. One day he is visited by weird looking people who tell him he’s not Greg Feely at all, but a bizarrely toupeed inter-dimensional binman, Ned Slade, agent of an organisation called the Hand. It is his job to clean up the messier, seedier and downright perverted side of human life. Through the twelve issues he battles against corrupted cell-sized organisms that force humans into perverted sex acts, giant flying sperm which fertilise women to death and a male US president with enormous breast implants and astonishing lapdancing skills. And at the end it seems Greg’s simply been rolling around on his kitchen floor all the time.
There’s some business involving agents of the Hand cleaning up comic books. They enter the two-dimensional space of the books, alter the course of the plots and then re-write the “Continuity Pages” so it seems nothing’s amiss. At times it feels like the same has been done to the Filth. There are little elisions in the books. Tiny chunks go unexplained and at the end you feel like there was something at the edge of your vision all the way through; always there and never properly seen. Kelvin’s missing an issue, so that might explain some of it, but the missing bits really are part of Morrison’s style and scheme. I wonder if the Filth has its own continuity pages sitting somewhere waiting for release?
By hook or by crook I will get to the trashy soiled bottom of this one or my name’s not Ted Mudd and I’m not wearing a lime green toupee over my unwashed comb-over.
