Josh's Reviews > The Filth

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 know it’s awesome, that the ramifications of such a find are monumental, and that I’m dealing with something much larger in scope than can be gleaned upon initial inspection. There is so much to process, so many layers, that it takes some extra work to get the full effect of the work. Put simply, Grant Morrison makes me think things I’ve never thought before. And that is why he is my favorite comic book author, and perhaps, favorite author period.

The Filth is chock-full of crazy ideas that leap off of the page and burrow deep into my brain. As with most of Grant Morrison’s works, The Filth kind of defies synopsis. I could tell you how it’s about a tired old social outcast whose life has two purposes, his cat and porn, until it is revealed to him that he is a member of an ultra-secret organization with the mission of cleaning up the nastiest of the nasty that civilization has to offer; and how this man struggles with the notion that he’s insane and making the whole thing up because that would be the saner of the two scenarios. I could try to summarize it in some terribly convoluted sentence, but the above doesn’t really get to the heart of the story, or more importantly, set the framework for the monsoon of ideas conveyed by the narrative.

Since I’m still making my way through the rather extensive Grant Morrison canon, I don’t want to make any fancy claims, but I think this might be his best graphic novel (creator-owned category, All-Star Superman is unsurpassable). As soon as I finished this one I wanted to start right over. Why didn’t I? I don’t know, but I am not putting this back on the shelf until I give it another go. As far as recommendations go, if you haven’t read anything by Grant Morrison yet, it’s probably best not to start here. I’d go with some of his more recent Batman offerings, his New X-Men stuff or the aforementioned All-Star Superman.