Product Description: Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean present their masterpiece in a completely remastered and redesigned edition overflowing with bonus material! Somewhere in London, a film director is dying of cancer. His life's crowning achievement, his greatest film, would have told the story of a European village as the last hour of 999 A.D. approached - the midnight that the villagers were convinced would bring with it Armageddon. Now that story will never be told. But he's still working it out in his head, making a film that no one will ever see. No one but us. Serialized in The Face in 1989, expanded and revised into a graphic novel in 1992, and adapted for radio in 2000, Signal to Noise has never stopped evolving. The bonus material in this first-time hardcover edition captures every leg of the journey, including three related short stories unseen in nearly two decades, an additional chapter created for the CD release of the radio drama, and a new introduction by Dave McKean along with the original by Jonathan Carrol and the radio drama introduction by Neil Gaiman.
thoughtful and strange I love Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, so naturally I had to read this book, and I was not disappointed. In many ways it is unique among their work. There's nothing supernatural in this book, only people struggling to make meaning out of hardship. The themes of suffering and the expected end to the world are universal, and definitely ring true in everyone's life. Check it out.
What is the Signal to Noise? This is a new released version of Signal to Noise graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean -- complete with new jacket art, the original introduction, and some new introductions and notes by both Gaiman and McKean.
Also included in this edition are three separate short stories that led to Signal to Noise's publishing and creation, while a few were made during its process. All three stories deal with the themes of language and communication in terms of barriers, and breaking those barriers down; exploring where the word begins and the individual ends, and, ultimately and especially 'ends.'
The placement of these stories -- from "Hackers" to "Deconstruction" and then "Vier Mauern" lead up to what will transpire, and what is contained within the main piece. This much is clear -- a film director finds out he is dying of cancer. He finds out not long before he is given permission to create his film -- a story about a European village that believes the Apocalypse is coming with the end of 999 AD.
These two events, the one that the director focuses on, and the one that he is experiencing are both "the end of a particular world." The text plays with the concepts of semantics, communication, and memory. The director spends his remaining days alone creating his film in his head, sifting through dreams and memories, and faces. Admittedly, you can get lost in the semantical pastiches that unfold and the experiments in language, yet the garbed trues and mixed up words symbolize the realm of the barely submerged subconscious and the barely awakened mind of the underworld.
Each chapter starts off with these interludes, these alchemical processes -- and somewhere, there is an answer to what the Signal to Noise is. Noise is seen as something superfluous, but something starts it -- something summons it. Semiotics and imagery also play a key role when looking at the mindset of the director -- in which the telephone, the ultimate symbol of the outside world in his flat becomes a monster -- an intrusive thing reminding him of the things that could distract him (a symbol that is very relatable to me), something that is only noise.
As the scenes progress, some of them dreamlike and filled with abstraction, an actual exegesis -- an examination of what an apocalypse is supposed to be, of its history in human culture is explored. The artwork for the four horsemen of the apocalypse is superb and vivid, while the Biblical sections identifying them are written down. Myths and legends are explored and possibilities and, ultimately the "revelation" (this word being the actual definition of "apocalypse") -- that the end of the world is not necessarily a communal event, but certainly an individual one. There are little ends of the world everyday.
And yet, like the Nordic Ragnarok, life continues on. The ending to this story is very quintessentially Neil Gaiman -- there are places where it could end, but it doesn't, which in this case works well. I am still not entirely sure what the Signal to Noise is -- words perhaps or art. Perhaps the signal is thought, and through words on a page, through the medium of the graphic novel ... there is no noise.
It is an interesting book for semioticians, semanticists, but also film students and critics, not to mention comics lovers and anyone who wants to explore a mind dealing with an end, and a voiceless continuance.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tony's Online Tips
Trevor
