Well, the ninth issue (of a total of thirteen) of Grant Morrison’s The Filth is out; do I need to tell you how over-the-top fabulous it is?
See, there’s this weird, aging guy Greg Feely who lives alone in London (?) with his cat… Only “Greg Feely” is just a “parapersonality,” and he is really John Slade, secret agent for The Hand… Or is it The Filth?… Anyway, The Hand is a kind of secret police force, and its mission is to cleanse the world of infections that threaten to destroy it: sort of like a Gaian equivalent of the human immune system. Or like The Avengers, only on a cosmic scale.
So there’s all kinds of stuff like viral nanobots that take over human bodies, and pornographers who generate bioengineered predatory megasperm, memetic cloning programs that turn human crowds into orgiastic Stepford Wives who provide the building blocks for an “emergent superorganism”–and so on.
But there’s more–how can I not mention the Leninist chimpanzee sharpshooter? or the transvestite President? Or the bizarre uniforms worn by agents of the Hand, especially “designed to remind folks of Freudian sex urges they prefer to deny”? Or Admiral Nixonnoxin? (Yes, the Nixon allusion is always a winner for me).
Not to mention all the levels of mock-meta-self-referentiality; for the Hand, it would seem, is also the pen-wielding hand of a divine comic book artist who is busy writing the absurdities of our lives…
With four issues still to come, there is no telling what will happen. Grant Morrison makes nearly everything else in contemporary fiction, literature or comix, look mundane. The psychedelic dislocations of Chris Weston’s drawings are pretty great too.