The "flip-flop" of making Hughes spontaneously a Baddy as soon as Gregg became a Goody so's they could fight all over again seemed quite forced to me, and I'm not very convinced that it really arises as an organic part of the narrative.
well, they've always flip-flopped. that's the point. they can't stay on the same side. they are, somehow, opposite poles of ... something. still working on that part.
I'd be surprised if the realisation that gregg is just a perv is a revalation to anyone; Morrison has said several times, that this comic is about a man, his mind and his dying cat and how he deals with those three things; body, mind, other.
i'm surprised that people seem to be taking this as an either/or with this issue as a definite resolution, that either the Hand (et al) is real or it's a delusion of Greg's. i don't think he's "really" one or the other.
i'm not sure what the hell's going on in this comic, honestly, but i think that i want to use these as jumping-off points:
- the seeming Hughes/Slade polarity
- the ink from the pen. i can't find that issue and i have no recollection whatsoever of what specifically happened with the giant pen
- the comic book universe, probably with due consideration to the fact that the comic book universe is a comic-book universe relative to the reality of the main story of The Filth, which itself is in a comic-book universe relative to us.
- Bio-Ship Sharon Jones. i think if there's an i-Life/Status Q polarity, then Sharon Jones, an ordinary person infected by an i-Life persona, is an emerging antithesis to the Hand agents, who are ordinary people infected by their personas.
- Dimitri 9. it just occurred to me: how do we know that Dimitri 9 was who he thought he was? what if he was an ordinary chimp infected with the Dimitri persona? was his name in the bottles in #11? is Grant trying to say something about the evolution of human consciousness?
- Man Green/Man Yellow. what the fuck was that all about?
- the opposition between i-Life and enforcement of Status Q. Status Q is like the immune system of reality, which purges, and i-Life is the oposite strategy: assimilation / co-existence. on some level, it seems to me that i-Life is the ultimate violation of Status Q, which leads me to the hunch that somehow this is all some kind of bizarre recursive murder mystery - who really killed Dr. Soon and why? or something...
i'm also enjoying working with the idea that this is the flipside to The Invisibles, the Qlippoth to the the Sephiroth. most of the parallels are obvious, but the ones striking me right now are:
- the visual similarity between Greg Feely and the negative future self-image of King Mob glimpsed briefly when Quimper is giving him a dirty mindjob in Black Science 2. i was re-reading the trade recently, and when i saw that frame of KM gone middle-aged, overweight and balding and sitting in his own filth (!) watching TV and thinking about how meaningless his life has become and how he vaguely remembers that he used to care about things, i was struck by how much he looked like Greg.
- parallels i'm seeing between Jolly Roger and Cameron Spector, especially in their deaths.
- similarities between Man Green / Man Yellow and the Harlequinade, which in and of itself is something i have difficulty getting a grip on. |
