The Filth (comics)

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The Filth
Cover to The Filth #13.
Publication information
Publisher	Vertigo
Schedule	Monthly
Publication date	August 2002 - October 2003
No. of issues	13
Creative team
Written by	Grant Morrison
Penciller(s)	Chris Weston
Inker(s)	Gary Erskine

The Filth is a comic book limited series, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine. It was published by the Vertigo imprint of American company DC Comics in 2002.^[1]

The Filth was Grant Morrison's second major creator-owned series for Vertigo after The Invisibles. Initially starting as a Nick Fury proposal for Marvel Comics,^{[Note 1]} Morrison adapted it as a 13-part series for Vertigo. The title refers both to the police (in British slang) and to pornography (in which Morrison "immersed" themselves while "researching" the series).^[5] Morrison has said that the series is their favorite among their works.^[6]

The series tells the story of Greg Feely, a bachelor whose main interests are his cat and masturbating to pornography. Feely is actually a member of a shadowy organization called The Hand and their attempts to keep society on the path to the "Status Q".

The Filth can be seen partly as a companion piece to The Invisibles in that it touches upon similar themes and concepts such as fractal realities, art affecting life, postmodern blurring of the fourth wall and the world as a single, living organism with humans as the cells that compose it. Morrison has stated that they had originally intended to make The Filth a thematic sequel to The Invisibles, followed by a third comic book series, The Indestructible Man.^[7] Morrison later concluded that their original Flex Mentallo series formed the first in the trilogy.^[8] Therefore, the sequence runs: 1. Flex Mentallo. 2. The Invisibles, 3. The Filth. The theme of The Filth consists of immersion into, and eventual redemption from, the forces of negativity.

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Greg Feely is a "dodgy bachelor" who lives alone in London. Though he appears to have no friends or family, and no hobbies beyond consuming trashy pornography, he cares deeply for animals such as his pet cat Tony. One day, he returns home from work to find an unknown woman named Miami naked in his bathroom. Miami informs him that 'Greg Feely' is actually a chemically-induced "para-personality", and that he is really Ned Slade, a secret agent for an extra-dimensional agency called the Hand (or, informally, "the Filth").^[1]

At the Hand's headquarters, hidden within a surreal netherworld known as the Crack, Slade's enigmatic commander Mother Dirt explains that the agency is "the hand that wipes the arse of the world", protecting "Status: Q" by suppressing threats to "social hygiene". Its agents, who range from talking dolphins to a cabaret dominatrix, ride in flying garbage trucks with giant gnashing teeth and wear bizarre outfits designed to deter bystanders by reminding them of suppressed sexual urges. Slade has has been brought out of retirement to stop his former friend Spartacus Hughes, a rogue Hand agent who is now devoted to sowing chaos and perversion across the planet.

Despite his misgivings, Slade deploys to the "hot zone" with Miami and Dmitri-9, a misanthropic former Russian chimpanzee cosmonaut and assassin. Hughes has taken over a laboratory housing an artificial microorganism called "I-Life", which was meant to heal diseases but has now been turned aggressive and warlike. In the ensuing confrontation, Hughes implies that Slade does not know the whole truth and declares that "anyone can be Spartacus Hughes", but is shot by Dmitri-9 before he can say more. Secretly, Slade takes some of the I-Life home in a fishbowl to look after it.

Receiving no answers from Mother Dirt, Slade quits and goes back to being Greg Feely. Nevertheless, the Hand repeatedly forces him back to work. In the wastelands of the Crack, where time moves so quickly that anyone without a protective suit will die of old age within minutes, he exposes a Hand inspector as a germophobic serial killer. In Los Angeles, he stops megalomaniac pornographer Tex Porneau (based upon real life porn director Max Hardcore^[9]) from destroying womankind with giant mutant sperm. Both cases involve so-called "anti-people", human beings designated by the Hand as a threat to Status: Q.

Meanwhile, Feely's home life deteriorates. The Hand doppelganger who takes his place while he's away has been deliberately neglecting Tony, making him sick. His nosy, small-minded neighbours have also come to believe that he is a paedophile and a child murderer. While on the run from the police, Feely finds a secret plea for help from another group of escaped I-Life, written in blood on a discarded tampon. Eventually he is rescued by the Hand.

A mysteriously resurrected Spartacus Hughes takes over a city-sized cruise ship and transforms it into a violent dystopia. On the bridge, Hughes tells Slade that he became an anti-person after seeing "too much dirt" during as a Hand agent, but is once again shot by Dmitri before he can explain. Afterwards, touring the Crack with his new teammate Cameron Spector, Slade learns that the Hand gets its name from a giant, literal hand holding a vast fountain pen that dominates the landscape, but gets few concrete answers about the nature of the agency. Back in the ordinary world, Feely finds that his doppelganger has allowed Tony to die, and becomes convinced that the Hand is deliberately destroying his civilian life to keep him under control. He also meets the escaped I-Life colony, now "piloting" the body of a woman from the lab, and reunites it with its fellow colony in the fishbowl.

As Feely's mental state spirals, the Hand comes under attack from a self-made, self-declared "superhero" called Max Thunderstone. Thunderstone has been secretly leading a group of friends in rebellion against the Hand, which he sees as a "gang of Orwellian monsters". Slade neutralises Thunderstone, revealing that Spartacus Hughes is a parapersona created by the rebels to destabilise Status: Q. But Thunderstone discloses that Greg Feely was originally one of the rebels too, and was in fact the one who discovered the Hand's existence.

In a rage, Feely takes his doppelganger prisoner, force-feeds him cat food, and purges his home of Hand surveillance devices. The Hand brands Feely an anti-person and sends Dmitri-9 to kill him, but Dmitri accidentally kills the doppelganger instead and is forced to flee, whereupon he is chased and killed by a mob of intolerant neighbours. With Dmitri's gun, Feely storms a local chemist's shop and discovers a hidden Hand storehouse, containing countless alphabetised parapersonas. When Spector arrives to talk him down, he shows her the truth: Greg Feely is the original person, and Slade – like Hughes, Spector, and all Hand agents – is merely a synthetic character who can be installed in any body the Hand chooses. "Death to Status: Q," Feely declares.

At Slade's apartment, Feely and Spector find the I-Life colony's host has been raped and murdered by Spartacus Hughes, now installed into Max Thunderstone's body and working for the Hand. They manage to kill him again by using a Hand garbage truck to maroon him in the Crack, but during the struggle he smashes their window, briefly exposing them to the Crack's super-fast timestream. Spector reveals that she has cancer and was only given six months to live. Her disease rushes to its agonising end, until a distraught Feely ends her suffering.

The story now becomes more non-linear and ambiguous. Back in his home, perhaps simultaneously or perhaps later, Feely writes a suicide note using a fountain pen, saying the police believe that he killed Tony through neglect and has concocted the Hand as a coping mechanism. Officers knock on his door, but he has already overdosed and falls to the floor before he can answer. While lying on the floor, he realises that the giant hand he saw in the Crack is his own hand, and that the entire Hand headquarters exists only in microscopic form during this specific moment in time.

Feely blasts his way through the headquarters towards Mother Dirt's sanctum. Miami confronts him and cools his rage, warning him that to destroy the Hand would be to destroy the world's immune system. Nevertheless, Feely enters Mother Dirt's chamber and finds a superintelligent mass of primordial compost-like material. Feely admits that he doesn't know how to make sense of the world, or what he has lost, or how to make things better. Mother Dirt offers him part of herself, and tells him to spread it on his flowers.

In an epilogue, Feely has survived his suicide attempt, although his life is in ruins. He has become a carrier for the I-Life, which he credits for his survival, and now he quietly wanders the world healing people that he meets, while flowers bloom in his wake. The final page depicts him walking away into an underpass, seemingly to meet with a reincarnated Tony.

A trade paperback of all 13 issues was released in 2004 (ISBN 1401200133).

• The Invisibles
• Flex Mentallo

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Filth.

• Curing the Postmodern Blues, a book by Tom Shapira on the series (has unpublished art by Weston and interviews with Morrison, Weston, and Erskine)
• The Filth discussed at ninthart.com (via archive.org)
• Grant Morrison interview at popthought.com
• Filth Review at PopImage