The double identities of comic book superheroes are structured in such a way as to suggest that strength in the masculine public sphere is the truest sign of manhood. At its extreme, the hypermasculine superhero embodies a dominant masculinity armoured against any possible infection by the feminine, even if that means rejecting love, marriage, and the home. Yet, at the same time, this armoured self can be read as the expression of a sense of male shame and inadequacy, with the hero removing himself from the home because he cannot trust himself given the, often sexual, violence that defines him as a man.
As early as 1993, Grant Morrison was concerned with “the idea of diffusing the hard body,” the results of which are evident in Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Flex Mentallo, for example. But it is in The Filth that he tries to show how, as he says, “the shabbiest, shittiest life you can live,” one defined and limited by shame, guilty, fear, hatred, and loneliness, “can be redeemed into glory by the power of imagination.” Here, the hero seemingly is Ned Slade, a high-ranking officer of the “supercleansing” operation The Hand, whose off-duty persona is Greg Feely, a single man, addicted to pornography and accused of paedophilia, but fiercely dedicated to his cat Tony’s well-being. Shifting between worlds of differing scales and dimensions, The Filth, as its name suggests, studies the interactions of perversion and policing and, in the process, the superhero’s part in redeeming male shame.