The Filth was published as a thirteen-issue series by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint from 2002 to 2003, with art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, and it is Morrison’s most difficult and most underrated work — a deliberate inversion of The Invisibles that replaces revolution with maintenance, liberation with hygiene, and cool with abject ordinariness.
Greg Feely is a middle-aged man who lives alone with his cat Tony in a dingy flat, surrounded by pornography. He discovers that his life as Greg Feely is a “parapersona” — a cover identity — and that his real self is Ned Slade, an agent of the Hand, a secret organization that functions as the immune system of the social body. The Hand combats threats to social health: rogue nanotechnology, out-of-control narratives, information viruses that warp reality. Each issue sends Slade on a mission that is bizarre, violent, and deeply unsettling.
The series is deliberately ugly — Morrison and Weston fill it with pornographic imagery, bodily fluids, and the detritus of consumer culture — because its subject is filth itself: the things that society produces but cannot acknowledge. The central metaphor is the immune system: just as the body must contain filth (bacteria, waste, decay) to function, so society must contain its own filth — pornography, violence, degradation — and the people who deal with it (garbage collectors, sewage workers, pornographers) perform an essential function that respectable society prefers not to see.
Collecting The Filth
Complete series (DC/Vertigo, 2002–2003): Thirteen issues.
Market values:
- Complete run #1–13, NM: $30–$80
- Trade paperback collection: $15–$25
- Deluxe hardcover: $25–$40