A postmodern shrug, The Filth is nth degree satire and immersion therapy for sexual perversion, disease, malaise, and surreality. Unfortunately, in its infinite freedom and ambition, it presents too many ideas at once, resulting in bombastic scattershot nonsense, if at least consistent in nihilism. Not for the squeamish moralist or the easily confused. A Short Note on the “Deluxe” Edition...Rating: C-Vertigo went cheap as usual—not much to compliment here. Tight creaky glued binding, super thin

Sorry, let me pull my head out of the wormhole this insane book shoved me into so I can try to review it. I feel like I've forgotten how the world works, like I'm coming down from some intense acid trip shot directly into my brain via Chris Weston's bananas art. I feel this way often after reading Morrison's stuff, but somehow The Filth takes the LSD cake. It's full-speed bonkers, delivering like 50 massive sci-fi ideas per page. You have to read this methodically or you'll miss stuff. Weston ja...

Reading Grant Morrison makes me feel profoundly smarter and dumber at the same time. For all intents and purposes, Morrison is an idea man. Inside his head must be a rushing tidal wave of Bowie-level freaky ideas whizzing around not unlike the doors in the Monsters, Inc. factory. But that doesn’t mean he is incapable of telling a good story, actually it’s far from it. When I read his stuff for the first time, I feel like an archaeologist who stumbled onto some ancient, unprecedented artifact. I

How insane is The Filth? Well, there's a talking Russian chimp assassin for a start. There's black semen because I don't know why! What else, superheroes who can't go past a fiction wall (because they can't go beyond the comic book pages or else they will splat-die) in the sky, death by giant sperm cells, a hero called ultra-humanitarian, a giant hand with a fountain pen, dolphin ink harvesters, an eye hit by -- okay the list goes so just check it out. Be warned that The Filth is offensive and t...

I was totally onboard with the unexpected meta-mindfuckery of The Filth, even if I found myself lost amidst the multi-dimensional madness at times. Chris Weston’s illustration for this is phenomenal, with many a panel leaving me slack-jawed in amazement. Fantastic stuff.

“Grant Morrison you crazy biotch what the fuck are you on about?!” - is what I was constantly thinking while reading The Filth (in between yawns)! I love Morrison - he wrote the greatest Batman run of all time and he’s the greatest comics writer there’s ever been - but, holy rice krispie treats, he produces some utterly impenetrable, way-too-out-there stuff sometimes!There’s a dude called Slade who seems like your average middle-aged guy - but secretly he’s a James Bond-type agent for a covert a...

Oh my god, what a cluster fuck.Like seriously, I've listened to a lot of interviews with Grant Morrison, I liked his Wonder Woman Year One and Flex Mentallo books, I'm currently making my way through the Doom Patrol omnibus, I like the dude a lot and I think he's on some next dimensional shit, but this just was too much.I could kinda tell at times what he was going for, but I think it just missed the mark for me. My least favorite of his work so far. Note: There is a hardcover version of this bo...

Who is Greg Feely? Is he a loser whose entire life consists of taking care of his cat and masturbating? Or is he Ned Slade, agent of a secret society called The Hand that safeguards the world against anti-people?Writing the X-Men must have made Grant Morrison suppress his weird urges because The Fifth is one of the more bizarre comics I've ever read and is in my top three Morrison reads. It's like a cross between Morrison's The Invisibles and Preacher by Garth Ennis, possibly with a bit of Warre...

I have always loved the idea of viewing our various bodily systems as tiny worlds inside of us, as if every person contains their own shrunken outer space with unique organisms living lives in a rapidly changing (and in my case, expanding) universe. It seems easier somehow to imagine life on an enormous scale; you rarely think about the possibilities at a submicroscopic level. To this day, every time I take some kind of cold or headache medicine, I anthropomorphize the drug travelling through my...

This was quite the odd little book. The story was interesting and the art was great, though it did drag on for a little too long with some issues that were just kind of padding.

A truly excellent and somewhat transgressive book, this dimensional-hopping sci-fi spy story, dressed in S&M leather and a fluorescent afro wig, aims to challenge the reader's values and expectations. And it might, if you're young and fairly conservative.Some of the book's scenes are truly distasteful while others will only make you cringe, but THE FILTH is only somewhat transgressive because most of those lines of decency are crossed by the story's villains. The protagonist, though not a conven...

Some books are random and zany for the sake of being random and zany. This book would have worked a thousand times better as MIB. Just give us some normal people in suits dealing with crazy mess. Some normalcy to offset and contrast the crazy. But noooo, Morrison has to have a monkey assassin (as a 'good' guy) and a garbage truck with giant teeth that the 'good guys' drive around and other nonsense that does nothing but distract from the story he's telling. Add in that the story jumps around lik...

I didn't enjoy this, and I actually struggled to finish it. But I'm a believer in finishing something once you've started it. The plot seemed all over the place and it was too weird for my tastes.

Why haven't I written a review yet? So it's 2005. I was still weaning off Elfquest and generic manga. I had read Miller's Batman and I slowly began to find out that cyberpunk might be my jam and I liked edgy stuff. I gathered I liked edgy stuff because I'd been reading Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (yeah) and thought that would be the worst of it. So armed with that knowledge I went to my local brick&mortar comic book shop and asked the owner for some recommendations. He patiently listened to me s...

Thoughtless or immature readers too often mistake unintelligibility with profundity. That is, they assume that the harder a work is to understand, the more meritorious it must be. Rarely is this the case. True, myriad (rightly) canonical cultural products are notoriously difficult to consume—Ulysses, Absalom! Absalom!, etc.—but even a cursory overview of Western literature reveals that such works pose exceedingly rare cases, formal experiments that actually manage to justify themselves. Quite a

If "The Invisibles" is Morrison as a young man, full of 1990s optimism and possibility, "The Filth" is Morrison as a depressed, despairing middle aged man, in the post-Millennial, post-9/11 haze of war and malaise. Instead of super-cool, Jerry Cornelius-like King Mob as Morrison's alter ego (or "fiction suit"), here the story centers around "dodgy bachelor" Greg Feely, who's torn between looking after his ailing cat and his super-spy alternate personality.Instead of "The Invisibles" battle betwe...

I read a lot of comics, so please listen to me when I say:The Filth is my favorite comic book. Ever. Ever ever.It makes The Invisibles seem predictable. Not that I don't like The Invisibles, because I do.The thing that sets The Filth apart from other Morrison titles, namely Invisibles, is the ultimate capitulation to the horrifying gravity of late capitalist society. Invisibles doesn't really give in to that, which is compelling, but unrealistic. The Filth is much more pragmatic in its assessmen...

Bizarre is an understatement for this. Grant Morrison's imagination has been let loose on these pages, and the result is confusing and fantastical yet oddly interesting and fascinating.The first few issues are--what I like to call--"headbusters". You are dropped into the world without any hint of an introduction, and it's a damn wild ride right from the beginning. Then the strangeness intensifies, among other things, and you're confused as hell as to what is happening and whether it's happening

Sleeper agent Greg Feely is activated in order to fight the rising tide of anti-persons in a hilarious wig. But who's going to look after his cat while he's away?You get the impression here that Grant Morrison is writing the kind of comic he really wants to read, or maybe the kind of comic his characters would like to read. He seems to be having a very good time, as if the need to keep The Invisibles at least semi-intelligible (in order to keep enough readers to keep it going) was a hobble he co...

You know what? I get it. Morrison is some sort of Genius that puts in layered information in his story-telling. And you need to bring your brain to the party if you're going to grasp the concepts he puts forth.That being said, the tittle pretty much describes the entire book for me. What is put out as some sort of literary masterpiece, just comes out as filth for me.It took me a while before I finally decided to buy this book, the reviews were actually pretty good, but the cover just didn't pull...