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

Received in ebook format from www.netgalley.com. Due to size etc, only able to view on laptop, and using the dreaded ADE which makes it clunky to navigate trough and difficult to read the text.

This is one of the Gaiman/Mckean books I missed first time round and am only coming across on republication. it's a relatively short story - about a film director, who finds out that he's dying of cancer, and looks back on the research and work he's done for a film he planned to make about a village waiting for the turn of the century and millennium of 999AD. Despite being ill and feeling week, he commences his screenplay, only to never see it get made.

McKean's drawings are of his standard occasionally fuzzy style and makes use of film stills (Groucho Marx and Monroe in particular). Gaiman's narrative brings across a level of pathos of a man feeling that he has not achieved what he wanted and that his life has been wasted.

I have seen the print version of this in the local comic book store and may well pick it up to read it in all its paper glory (that I dont think I got in the digital version)

I would rather give this a 3.5. The art is stunning ~~

1159 ( )

Weird but good. I don't think I grasped everything, it's probably better not as an ebook. ( )

I found this to be a very interesting graphic novel. It's about a writer/director who gets diagnosed with cancer and decides to forgo treatment and finish the film in his head instead. It's about the turn of the first millennium (999 AD) and a village that expects the end of the world. Both the story about him and the story of the villagers are very interesting. Since this is so short, I'd highly recommend that people read it. ( )