The Filth, written by Grant Morrison, with art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, is about how “the shabbiest, shittiest life you can live,” one defined and limited by shame, guilt, fear, hatred, and loneliness, “can be redeemed into glory by the power of imagination,” says Morrison. The comic’s 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. Slade and the other characters of The Filth allow Morrison to reinvent familiar elements of the comic book superhero narrative, especially the double identity and its relation to conceptions of masculinity. Generally structured so as to suggest that strength in the masculine public sphere is the truest sign of manhood and that a home life is only compensation for the man who has failed, at the same time a secret life of sexually-charged superheroism can be read as an expression of a sense of male shame and inadequacy. In The Filth, as its name suggests, Morrison studies the interactions of perversion and policing and, in the process, the superhero’s part in redeeming male shame. Shifting between worlds of differing scales and dimensions, he subjects readers to what he calls a “healing inoculation of grime” which, by requiring them to comprehend incompatible narrative possibilities which destabilise categories of hero and villain, male and female, or reality and fantasy, seeks to provoke that leap of the imagination into glory.