Not that I want this to turn into the all-Grant-Morrison-all-the-time blog, but…this is a blurb about “The Filth” I wrote for the Comics Journal a few years back (2004, I think?), just in case anyone’s interested.<\/p>\n
Grant Morrison\u2019s first two popular series \u2014 \u201cAnimal Man\u201d and \u201cDoom Patrol\u201d \u2014 were notable for, of all things, their elegance. Dreamlike, addled, bursting with ideas, they nonetheless unfolded with an inevitable grace, akin to the best movies of Bu\u00f1uel or David Cronenberg. Since then, though Morrison has largely forsaken his idiosyncratic sense of pacing, . These days he relies half the time on relatively conventional super-hero plots, and the other half on an aesthetic of one-damn-thing-after-another. The Filth is an example of the second of these, but if the whole isn\u2019t quite the sum of the parts, the bits and pieces still form some of the trippiest debris floating through comics, mainstream or otherwise. Marxist assassin chimpanzees, psychic-defense toupees, porn stars spurting black semen, plus standard Morrison themes like pulp-comics-as-metaphor-for-reality and the sadness of pet owners \u2014 like, what does it all mean, man? Something about the deliberate destruction of utopias? The insanity lying beneath the surface of the workaday world? And is the Weston\/Erskine art really meant to look like Hanna-Barbera\u2019s take on H.R. Giger? Who cares? I\u2019ll plop my money down as long as I can open the thing at random and find characters spouting lines like, \u201cI learned to read the intestinal weather and correctly guess the lifestyle and habits of the people around me from their stifled farts.\u201d Morrison doesn\u2019t really do beauty that well anymore, but God (or whatever) bless him, he\u2019ll always have dada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not that I want this to turn into the all-Grant-Morrison-all-the-time blog, but…this is a blurb about “The Filth” I wrote for the Comics Journal a few years back (2004, I think?), just in case anyone’s interested. Grant Morrison\u2019s first two … Continue reading