Why Don't You Just Stop Wanking And Do Something Useful With Your Life?
Heh, thought that would get your attention. I'm referring to The Filth the latest graphic novel from Grant Morrison, which centres upon a sad middle-aged loner called Greg Feely, whose existence revolves around porn consumption, pandering to his cat Tony and manipulating anthead images onto youngsters from his estate. His routine gets disturbed by regular interruptions from a shadowy organisation called The Hand, who call upon him to resume his persona as Ned Slade, a super-cleansing operative required to wipe out the scum whose 'social hygiene issues' are threatening the balance of their subterranean society.
So far so murky, but when the replacement Greg Feely (who keeps the loner's life going while Ned Slade is cleaning up the 'anti-persons') starts neglecting Tony and alienating the neighbours in an apparent attempt to destroy this humdrum existence, Feely/Slade has to decide which is his true personality and which the parapersonality - is he a super-cleansing op with a defective memory, or are The Hand simply selecting random citizens at will to do their dirty work? Or is it all the deranged delusions of an unstable, unsavoury and violent man?
Morrison successfully brings the surreal paranoia of William Burroughs and Philip K Dick into the present day with a gritty, visceral bang. It's certainly adult stuff in every sense of the word, tackling current political/social issues as well as musings on the very nature of existence and personal identity. The plot gets deliriously confusing at times but there's enough fighting, fucking, swearing and black humour to keep readers entertained who might otherwise struggle to get their head around Morrison's wider allegorical aims. Throw in a talking, farting Soviet sniper chimp; a porn star who shoots black jism; an attack of killer sperm; a lapdancing President and a hideous environment where operatives have to drink each other's piss to survive, and you have a book which (anti)heroically refuses to take its mind out of the gutter for one frame.
A word, also, for artist Chris Weston whose imagination is let loose by Morrison's wild plotting to create some stunning action scenes against beautifully-detailed backdrops. The Filth may seem expensive for a 'comic-book' but it contains 13 22-page segments of such dense, imaginative narrative that it seems excellent value-for-money and it definitely lends itself to re-reading and re-visiting at regular intervals. Where there's muck, there's subversive, transgressive entertainment, it seems.
Heh, thought that would get your attention. I'm referring to The Filth the latest graphic novel from Grant Morrison, which centres upon a sad middle-aged loner called Greg Feely, whose existence revolves around porn consumption, pandering to his cat Tony and manipulating anthead images onto youngsters from his estate. His routine gets disturbed by regular interruptions from a shadowy organisation called The Hand, who call upon him to resume his persona as Ned Slade, a super-cleansing operative required to wipe out the scum whose 'social hygiene issues' are threatening the balance of their subterranean society.
So far so murky, but when the replacement Greg Feely (who keeps the loner's life going while Ned Slade is cleaning up the 'anti-persons') starts neglecting Tony and alienating the neighbours in an apparent attempt to destroy this humdrum existence, Feely/Slade has to decide which is his true personality and which the parapersonality - is he a super-cleansing op with a defective memory, or are The Hand simply selecting random citizens at will to do their dirty work? Or is it all the deranged delusions of an unstable, unsavoury and violent man?
Morrison successfully brings the surreal paranoia of William Burroughs and Philip K Dick into the present day with a gritty, visceral bang. It's certainly adult stuff in every sense of the word, tackling current political/social issues as well as musings on the very nature of existence and personal identity. The plot gets deliriously confusing at times but there's enough fighting, fucking, swearing and black humour to keep readers entertained who might otherwise struggle to get their head around Morrison's wider allegorical aims. Throw in a talking, farting Soviet sniper chimp; a porn star who shoots black jism; an attack of killer sperm; a lapdancing President and a hideous environment where operatives have to drink each other's piss to survive, and you have a book which (anti)heroically refuses to take its mind out of the gutter for one frame.
A word, also, for artist Chris Weston whose imagination is let loose by Morrison's wild plotting to create some stunning action scenes against beautifully-detailed backdrops. The Filth may seem expensive for a 'comic-book' but it contains 13 22-page segments of such dense, imaginative narrative that it seems excellent value-for-money and it definitely lends itself to re-reading and re-visiting at regular intervals. Where there's muck, there's subversive, transgressive entertainment, it seems.
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