Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

What I felt was interesting in this issue was how the Peoples of Libertania were labelled as “anti-human” and fed to the sharks with no attempt to investigate their new-found state (other than Mercury’s field recordings which were made for the purposes of future inoculation rather than deeper understanding). As stated above, this suggests that any new evolutionary forms that do not rely directly on the imperatives of Mother Earth/Dirt are to be treated as “unhygienic” and subject to super-cleansing. The Filth then are simply normalcy police, enforcing the biological directive of Mother Dirt, under whose ordinance we live as mere biota.
Cameron’s “scabby touch” remark was also interesting in that it was similar to the polis’ “Don’t let their shadows touch you” warning, which got me thinking that highly-evolved forms (Libertania and Spartacus Hughes) are as toxic to cleansing agents and their Status Q as Hand operatives are to “normals”. They perhaps represent a break from the *natural order* and a leap into new social and cultural forms where mother Dirt has no jurisdiction.

Grant seems to be riffing on the question: are we simply the sum of our biological make-up and therefore tied to our genetic coding (symbolised in The Filth’s strongly ordered hierarchical structure, their Freudian suits, ballack-mobiles and chimpanzee agent), or are we capable of achieving new evolutionary forms and structures where “we don’t need to be judged, we’re all judges. We don’t need police” (like the original pirate ship/ community Libertatia) ? Spartacus mentions that this is the “next stage in the evolution of human civilisation”, a super-organism birthed through violence and perhaps like himself “infected with understanding”. Are these forms then part of the natural evolution of humanity, ie are we actually designed to break from nature and achieve a new order defined by our own limits?

I think this is also why Spartacus and Greg/ Ned are the most interesting characters in the book, in that they are not simply following directions from above, but are trying to transcend their mandate and define their own paths beyond the genetic pre-dispositions of Status Q (albeit in very different ways).

Finally, and as a side note, all of this reminds me of the opening lines from Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain , whose social commentary and psychedelic/cosmic slop mirror many of the book’s ideas, and which I think may have been a direct influence on Miami’s Venereal Afronaut look:

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit

Filth #8