The Millennium Canon – The Filth by Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, Gary Erskine

I love comics.  I love talking about comics.  But the trouble with talking about comics is the same titles keep getting thrown about. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and Maus are great comics all, but they were published twenty years ago.  It is, quite frankly, time to move on.

With this ongoing series, “The Millennium Canon,” I’ll attempt to bring to the forefront new classics of sequential art.  The criteria is three-pronged:

1. The work must have a complete story, by that I mean there is a beginning, middle and an end.  One should be able to hand this single story to someone who has no previous familiarity with the main characters and they should still be able to understand what is going on.
2. It was published after Dec 31, 1999.
3. It must be awesome.  I realize this subjective, but I am confident that awesomeness, like cream, rises to the top.

I brought these criteria up with a friend of mine who’s going to be teaching comics as literature, and he expressed doubt that there were more than a handful of titles that fit.  Most of the good stuff, he said, was published before 2000.  Which to my mind is, naturally, fighting words.

Let’s start by taking out the trash, shall we?

Morrison and Weston’s The Filth came hot off the heels of Morrison’s The Invisibles, and was purposely planned to be everything The Invisibles was not.  The sexy rebels were replaced by a hideous authority they might as well have fought; one can easily see The Filth being batted around by Morrison as one-shot villain organization for King Mob and the rest to blow up.  If that was the case, Morrison thankfully thought differently and as consequence, we’re better off.  If a little dirtier.

The Filth sets itself up as a spy story — complete with background dialogue of why James Bond isn’t all he’s cracked up to be — but it’s a superhero story through and though.

Pornography fan and terminal bachelor Greg Feeley dons his brightly-colored uniform and becomes Ned Slade, super-agent of the The Hand, a combination police forces/garbage detail that maintains Status: Q and mines old comic books for technology that only had to be drawn, not built.  But as a member of The Hand, Slade is belittled, abused, and forced to perform and witness horrors beyond the usual fever dream.  When you’re killing men with their own piss and finding SOSs scrawled on used tampons, you know your power fantasy has taken sharp turn downhill.

Greg’s not the only one who’s finding superheroism a lot harder than it should be.  The book is littered with overgrown boys who find their special powers don’t quite grant them the freedom the comics promised. Having a super-nose, super-sperm or being a literal super-man escaped from the pages of a comic book doesn’t make heroes, only frustrated madmen.  Comic books and pornography litter the background of the panels, and Morrison and Weston seem to be implying that they are one and the same, impotent fantasies for people who cannot experience the events themselves.  Putting on your pervert suit in front of the mirror is one thing, but as Slade himself tells self-made superhero Max Thunderstone, “You should have stayed indoors where you were safe.”

It’s The Hand’s job to clean up the streets, after all.  And when there’s something on the street that doesn’t match, well, it’s got to be taken care of.  Someone has to wrap the bodies in shiny vinyl bags and bury the remains … otherwise, we might notice something was seriously wrong with the way the rest of us live our lives.

Morrison’s a writer known for his bizarre throw-away ideas, and he’s got a perfect artistic partner in Chris Weston, whose detailed, realistic style gives things like gigantic dustmites and dump trucks (with gaping, toothy maws in the front, no less) a tangible quality.  The tours of the Crack — the Hand’s base of operations — feel at once familiar and alien, and it’s a credit to Weston and inker Gary Erskine that even bizarre elements like cybernetic dolphins and giant, flying sperm aren’t the jarring elements they could be.  Unusual, yes.  But they bleed right into the story just fine.

While The Filth’s main characters spend a great deal of time literally wading through shit, the book itself contains a surprisingly upbeat message.  Despite the repeated batting around by authority figures, Greg Feeley finds that he does have power over his own life, to change it and mold has he sees fit — and that the status quo is a creation of men and women, and any of us can write a new chapter to it, provided we have enough ink.

At its heart, The Filth is a fable about a man who gets a new life, only to find he doesn’t want it.  The power fantasies that fueled the series’ opening are shown by the end to empty and self-defeating.  In the world of The Filth, you can’t save the planet by putting on a costume and firing rayguns.  Sometimes all you can do is clean up the place for those smaller than you, and hope for the best.

Mined by: Jared Axelrod