Brian Kirsten

The Filth

May 18, 2004
Finished reading The Filth trade paperback the other day, and I had some thoughts spring up because of it. Now first off, I had collected the entire series prior to my purchase of the TPB, and I bought the collected version for two reasons. 1) I was tired of hunting through my long boxes to find the earlier issues of The Filth that I enjoyed (gasp I don't keep my comics in order! The horror!). 2) I really dug the look of the TBP and the art on the cover, but more on that later. The Filth was my "gateway drug" into the world of Grant Morrison, I had never read any of his stuff prior to my first purchase of #1, but after reading it, I quickly added him to my "buy everything this author does list". I moved onto Morrison's New X-Men run because of this series, and started purchasing the trade paperbacks of The Invisibles because of his work on The Filth. For those of you that haven't read it, The Filth is definitely hard to describe. In a nutshell (and for all I know I'm interpreting it all wrong), it's about the garbage collectors of the world, the ones that truly keep the order, because the world can be a horrible place and somebody has to clean up the mess. To be brutally honest with you, when I was buying the singles I didn't have a clue to what was going on. But it was Morrison's wild imagination coupled with Chris Weston's uncanny ability to re-create the monsters in Morrison's nightmarish visions that caused me to enjoy the series so much. Now this little rant is not a review, although obviously this is (in my opinion) one of the better comic series to come out in a while (no not THE BEST, just one of THE BEST!). It was just after my completion of reading it I had an idea. Can they put out a "Special Edition"? No, not a metal plated, multiple cover mis-mashed piece of crap. I'm talking about something with the "special features" of a DVD, with original character sketches and layouts from Weston, notes and research from Morrison, conversations between the two detailing character development, and designs and ideas for the amazing cover art provided by Carlos Segura. The fonts used in the series and breakdowns of logo design would be cool too. Am I the only one that would find this interesting? It would be the equivalent of "The Art of Toy Story", a sort of documentary, behind the scenes of making the comic book from funny little concept into the tome that the trade paperback is. I for one would buy something like this, because other than getting enjoyment out of the story and art, I would love to see the "process" of creating the book. I'm guessing there are others out there as sick as I am. I know when I went over to SFMOMA they had a book section in their museum store, this type of book would sell there I think. Now, I'm not trying to say that they should add additional material to an already great piece of work, simply for the sake of selling it in museum stores. But I think that members of the creative community and even those who aren't officially member of the creative community would be interested in it. I understand that there are some "special edition" items featured in some of the TPB's that come out nowadays, but I want to see that with everything! Making comics is hard work, and I would love to see not only the fruition of the creative teams efforts but how they reached that point. This possibly could work in the form of a completely separate book. Sold in book stores (no I'm not saying to screw over the comic book store owners), in maybe the art section? Is this just crazy?

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