The Filth: Issue 3

I don't think issue three of The Filth is one of its strongest issues. It goes over a lot of classic Morrison concepts and doesn't bring that much new to them. It's difficult to place this into the overall narrative of the piece, and a lot of its significance doesn't become apparent later. That said, it's not like there isn't good stuff.

The opening sequence is classic Morrison, revisiting stuff previously discussed in Animal Man and Flex Mentallo. The idea that Hand agents can enter a superhero comic and affect it on the page ties in with his ideas of different layers of reality. The Filth is a comic that exists in our reality. It appears in two dimensions in our reality. The tale of Secret Original exists in two dimensions within the reality of The Filth, a comic within a comic. The idea that the hand agents can leave the page gives them the 5D power over space and time that John a Dreams has in The Invisibles. The most interesting thing to me about this sequence is seeing the 2D characters' reaction to the changes in their universe. I also love the idea of these people using the "paperverse" as a farm for technology. The fact that they can go in, grab the scorpion gun, and then return to three dimensional reality is very cool. It's using fiction as a farm for reality, and the interplay between the two there is really interesting. It's almost a literal representation of the way invention turns idea into reality.

Secret Original himself is a character whose been drawn out of his fictional universe into the "real" world. I love the idea that, upon realizing the fictionality of his universe, he is subjected to all kinds of twisted versions, notably the slash style tales of him and Eve.

What I find most interesting here is Greg's emotional journey. In burying the cat, we see him feeling very real emotions, and in the world he exists in, that's his only anchor. Emotion is his reality. That's why Greg sticks where Ned doesn't. However, he can never return to the world he had before. For one thing, he's got another version of himself tied up in the closet, for another, Dmitri has turned up to try to get him back to the hand.

It's notable that Greg has lost the combover. His transformation to Ned Slade has stuck a little bit, the new Greg is much cooler than Greg circa issue one.

Related Posts
The Filth: Issues 1 and 2 (12/18/2004)
Seaguy (4/9/2005)
We3 (6/22/2005)