The Filth

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The cover of issue 11

"There's a reason they call us The Filth."

Grant Morrison's thematic follow-up to The Invisibles, The Filth is a very darkly humourous maxiseries about Greg Feely, a hapless loner who lives alone with his ailing cat and subsists on a diet of chocolate and pornography, who one day discovers that he is really Ned Slade, a gun-toting interdimensional agent. The series lasted for 13 issues (August, 2002-October, 2003).

It seems that Ned works for The Hand, AKA The Filth, a super-secret agency tasked with eliminating anything that might upset the natural balance of the world. Greg Feely is just a holiday persona used by agents who need to take time out in a fictional life to recuperate. Unfortunately, Spartacus Hughes, a body-jumping agent for The Hand, has gone rogue and Ned has been called out of his holiday to go sort things out.

Or it's all a lie and Greg's finally gone crazy.

Meanwhile, a group of micro-organisms created to "hug the cancer away" take over a technologically modified woman named Sharon Jones as their bio-vessel, and eventually take up residence in what may or may not be a puddle on Greg's kitchen floor, containing what may or may not be the ink supply for the whole comicverse. And then there's a Golden Age comic book hero named Secret Original, who escaped from his pages and was left permanently crippled in the attempt. And there's a little flower shop near Greg's house. And a communist chimp. And kids, kids with ant heads.

The book is a snapshot of Britain in the early 2000s (paedophile-hunting mobs, security cameras on every street corner, etc.) mixed with a mad otherworld that looks like a cross between Philip K. Dick's nightmares and a rubber fetish playground.

Morrison, who believes that his comics are also spells that can magically transform the consciousness of his readers, intended it to be an 'inoculation' against the horrors of modern living as well as a celebration of the nature of filth: something which is an inescapable part of living, but which humanity tends to ignore, bury or flush away.

The series also revisits the concept from The Invisibles of all humans being cells in a single immense organism and puts a more literal spin on it. For example, Ned Slade is effectively an antibody and The Hand itself is an immune system for reality. Thus, the 'bad guys' represent different illnesses (body-jumping Spartacus Hughes is a virus, Anders Klimakks is an STD, etc.) that must be destroyed in order for the body to thrive. And just as the body builds up a resistance to infections by copying their traits, so The Hand reprograms rogue elements into becoming agents themselves.

This also leads to a return to one of Morrison's long-standing obsessions: the repetition of patterns from one 'layer' to the next. For example, Slade is a living thinking being, but is merely an operative that exists to maintain the being that is reality. This is then replicated in the tiny nano-people that end up living inside Slade, who may themselves create smaller versions to go inside themselves, and so on and so on forever.

This same concept turns up in the form of the comic book that The Hand's agents enter to acquire their Weird Science: It's possible to imagine a never-ending series of layers to reality in which the reader reads a comic about people reading a comic about people reading a comic about... well, you get the idea. Utimately, the comic is a distillation of every concept and interest that Morrison had up to that point, collected in 13 supremely odd issues.

And there's a sweary communist chimp in it and everything.

For porn as a plot device, see Filth.

Tropes used in The Filth include:
  • All Just a Dream: Implied from the start, then discussed, subverted and deconstructed just to screw with the reader.
  • Anything That Moves: Tex Porneau is the living embodiment of this trope, going so far as to create a breed of human-sized flying sperm so that he can LITERALLY FUCK THE ENTIRE CITY OF LOS ANGELES. Anders Klimakks, with his career as a porn star/ bio-engineered sex god and his nearly 900-woman mating record, is also a perfect example of this trope.
  • Ascended Fanboy: Max starts out describing himself as this. Then after he's killed, the body he's worked so hard to get into comic book superhero shape is hijacked and used by another aspiring superman.
  • Body Horror -- Sharon Jones in "Us v Them".
  • Brainwashed -- Ned Slade has been brainwashed into thinking that he is sad loner Greg Feely. But this is subverted toward the end of the series when it is revealed that Feely is the true identity and The Hand are trying to turn him into Ned Slade.
  • Broken Angel: Secret Original.
  • The Call Knows Where You Live
  • Captain Ersatz -- According to Morrison, the story started out as a pitch for Marvel Comics' Nick Fury, but was seen as too strange and radical a change for the character - i.e. the reader being told that Fury is in fact an injectable fake personality inserted into several unassuming saps over the years by a shadowy uber-organisation.
    • Nevertheless, a few years later Brian Bendis and Jonathan Hickman created a vaguely similar idea for Fury - his organisation, SHIELD, has been puppets of his enemy, HYDRA, since its creation - and it was published.
      • It probably succeeded because it wasn't nearly so radical in comparison.
    • The characters from Secret Original's world are also very obvious Captain Ersatz types of famous superheroes.
  • Chekhov's Gun: The flower shop being referred to as psychedelic at the very start of the story.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: Secret Original is a Golden Age superhero who discovered his world is a comic book. Think about this. It's debatable if The Filth as a whole qualifies.
  • Crapsack World -- The whole point of The Filth is to explore the worst excesses of society.
  • Creator Breakdown -- The whole series is the result of such a breakdown.
  • Dead Baby Comedy
  • Deconstructor Fleet
  • Eldritch Abomination: Mother Dirt, big boss of The Hand.
  • Electric Instant Gratification -- Max Thunderstone mentions that scientists have discovered enlightenment is analagous to an epileptic seizure in a certain area of the brain. Part of his plan to uplift humanity is to show people how to push their own "Buddha Button".
  • Five-Man Band -- Ned Slade's "special squad" of the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits from the five divisions of the Hand, with Ned as The Hero, Cameron Spector as The Lancer, Dmitri-9 (little, but a vicious killer) as The Big Guy, Moog Mercury as The Smart Guy, and Miami Nil as The Chick. Alternatively, since Greg Feely questions everything Ned does you could argue that Feely/Slade is his own Lancer.
  • Fourth Wall -- Played with in "Structures and Ultrastructures".
  • Fridge Brilliance: What if Feely is a pedophile, and the Filth (as the "cleaners" of society) are his mind's way of coping, by providing the illusion of an outside group willing to "clean" him up?
  • Friends with Benefits: Nil and Slade. Sort of.
  • Funetik Aksent -- Cameron Spector. A lot of exposition in the comic is spoken by her, which makes it all the more harder to figure out.
  • Genre Savvy -- Max Thunderstone. Arguably also a case of Wrong Genre Savvy, as he thinks he's the "hero" of the story and the Hand are the villains.
  • Granola Girl: Soon.
  • Historical In-Joke:

"Dmitri, you just shot the President!"
"Not my first one."

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