Signal to Noise

This is not your run of the mill comic book. It's a graphic novel with some very strange and trippy art and a very sad topic: a movie maker's last weeks of life after he gets diagnosed with cancer. He refuses any treatment and innevitably starts writing the script for his last movie, one he'd been having dreams and visions about.
It doesn't get too personal though, so even if the setting is very dark, you don't connect too much with the main character. It's a short story in the end and it is good at what it tries to be - illustrating the difference between the meaningful signal and the meaningless noise all around it. ( )

Dark. A graphic novel made from a collage published in a magazine, reworked and republished and changed again. The art is unlike anything I have seen. Hypnotic, almost. The story is sad, a film director finds out he has cancer and works on his last film before he dies, which becomes this great metaphor for life, mortality and of course immortality of yourself or your ideas. It was dark, enigmatic, intense and as I said, unlike anything I read before.

I read everything by Gaiman (especially look forward to his work with Dave McKean). Short, suprisingly deep story ("The world is always ending for someone."), but it's really a showcase for McKean's art. ( )

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean present their masterpiece in a completely remastered and redesigned edition overflowing with bonus material! 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.

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. As the film director tried to convey, the end of the world is not a communal event, it does not encompass everyone--it is different for all of us. We all experience our own individual "apocalypse." I wholeheartedly agree.

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. I especially loved "Vier Mauern." McKean's artwork for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is superb.

Book Details:

Title Signal to Noise
Author Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean
Reviewed By Purplycookie ( )

http://nomiddlename.blogspot.com/2008/05/clearing-my-backlog.html ( )