Signal to Noise

AUTHOR: Gaiman, Neil

ARTIST: Dave McKean (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: VG Graphics; Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1989-1992

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1992

Publication History

Signal to Noise has sustained a variable life, extending through different formats. Conceptually inspired by a short work, entitled “Wipe Out,” composed by Dave McKean for the fashion magazine The Face, it developed into a series written by Neil Gaiman for sequential publication in The Face in 1989. VG Graphics brought out a collected edition in 1992, in tandem with Dark Horse Comic’s American edition, and the work has continued to be reprinted by Dark Horse Comics through 2007.

Following the first collected version of the work in the United Kingdom, a BBC Radio 3 drama based on the work was broadcast in 1996, with input from both Gaiman and McKean. McKean later released a recording of the radio drama as an audio CD through his own record label, Feral, and it has since been distributed by Alan Spiegel Fine Arts. Various other permutations of the work include a stage play produced by the NOWtheatre Group in Chicago.

The Dark Horse Comics 2007 edition contains “Wipe Out,” prose poems by Gaiman and McKean, a final “millennial” chapter, and a “remastering,” which was necessary when the original “film” for the book was lost and the work needed to be recomposed. Both Gaiman and McKean have seen the graphic work as a project with a life of its own, transmuting and becoming “interactive” in the years following its original publication, a concept in keeping with the themes of the work itself.

Plot

Signal to Noise depicts the final days of a film director in London who learns that he is dying of cancerous tumors. Refusing treatment, the director finishes his final script at the cost of personal relationships, but he dies with his personal vision and creative legacy intact. The eleven-part sequence utilizes first-person narrative and flashback memory sequences to illustrate the director’s impressions of his own illness as well as the conceptual processes behind his final film project.

The director narrates the opening sequences of his “mental film,” a subject dealing with the year 999 a.d., set in a village in the middle of Europe, where townspeople await the end of the world. Waking in his Islington apartment after a nightmare, the director ignores a call from his doctor and friend, Julia, who insists he accept treatment for his condition. He asks himself about the “sense” of life, introducing the title questions “What’s signal? What’s noise?” He recalls learning of his condition, refusing treatment, and going home. Meeting with friend and producer Inanna at his home, he cancels the film project and relates the grim news of his sickness.

Thinking of millennial celebrations to occur ten years in the future, the director realizes he will be dead; he becomes frustrated with his body and his work, wishing for more time to get his final project “right.” Three months following his diagnosis, the director begins to write, delineating the characters of the village.

The director’s upstairs neighbor, Reed, visits him, and they discuss the possibility of a “pattern” in life’s chaos, a premise that the director rejects. Inanna continues to contact the director, but he denies that he is writing the film script. He completes more than half of his film script and settles on Apocatastasis as the title for his film, a term meaning renewal or return to an original position. He agrees to allow Julia to do a blood test but refuses treatment again when the results appear bleak.

The director completes his film script with great satisfaction, feeling that it can now live independently of him. He finds himself among the villagers awaiting the apocalypse in silence. As the moment passes, the villagers begin to realize that their world has not ended, but the director has died. Reed gives Inanna the envelope left behind for her by the director. At home, Inanna opens the envelope, finds the script for Apocatastasis, and begins to read.

Almost ten years later, Inanna narrates her experiences, having seen the director’s film through production and moved on with her life. Approaching the millennium, he has been impossible to forget, as a stage play based on his diaries and a flurry of interviews has accompanied a documentary and retrospective about him. The events give her a sense of art’s function, allowing the living to commune with the dead. The millennium comes and goes, much as the director predicted, with human beings moving on along the same path, as in Apocatastasis.

Characters

•The Director, the work’s protagonist and narrator, is a veteran and award-winning filmmaker approaching a major project when he learns he is terminally ill. Living in London in an Islington apartment, he continues work on the film script, regardless of whether or not it will see publication, and he considers the concept of apocalypse and of “apocatastasis,” or renewal. He wears large glasses, has a graying moustache and disheveled salt-and-pepper hair, and dresses in simple clothing of blue, black, white, or gray-brown.

•Julia is the director’s doctor and friend whom he loves but keeps at arm’s length. She diagnoses the director’s tumors and attempts to treat him, but she is denied. The director envisions her as an attractive snow leopard, but she is never portrayed visually in the text.

•Inanna Shah-Leshy is the director’s producer who intends to facilitate his current project. She has a great attachment to the director, may have at some time been his lover, and admits that she loves him after his death. She is portrayed with long, dark, wavy hair and in light-colored, feminine clothing. She also acts as narrator for the final, posthumous chapter of the work.

•Reed is the director’s upstairs neighbor and friend. His idealistic belief in possible “patterns” in the universe contrasts with the agnostic views of the director and the rationalist views of Inanna, who is described as his “opposite.” He confesses his love for the director following his death, and appears with long hair in a ponytail, a short beard, and light-colored clothing.

Artistic Style

The style of Signal to Noise is partly patterned after the short work “Wipe Out” that McKean designed for The Face magazine. Features of the original work include the random cutting and pasting of language and the cinematic effect of shifting angles around a central figure. These features became a stylistic template for the new work, leaving room for reader interpretation of the significance of seemingly random language to the story line; extra material added to later versions of Signal to Noise shows the evolution of complementary stylistic elements in McKean’s work.

Like Gaiman’s and McKean’s Violent Cases (1987), Signal to Noise includes the use of multilayered pencil sketches, mixed-media collage and photography, and a grid effect of sequential narrative with some large, full-page spreads. Signal to Noise is divided into strict white-framed grid patterns for about two-thirds of its contents, interrupted by striking half-page or full-page open images, usually depicting the director. A lavish, painted, double-page spread shows the villagers waiting at a distance at the time of the director’s death.

Color scheme is also similar between Violent Cases and Signal to Noise, focusing on blues, grays, and browns. Signal to Noise displays a washed effect of ink and blue watercolor, giving the film sequences a richer texture than the external narrative. McKean’s broader style within the work consistently evokes luminous surfaces against a dark background, while the final “millennial” chapter appears more celebratory, with a bold use of gold, purple, and green backgrounds.

Lettering includes white narrative text overlaying dark panels, whereas reported speech appears in white speech bubbles. The final “millennial” chapter, however, presents text narrative as black on a streaming red banner. Photographic elements appear both as purely photographic collage and as part of mixed-media imagery, particularly implemented in “storytelling” sequences dealing with religious content or the remote past.

Themes

The title Signal to Noise introduces what may be the most general theme of the work, the relationship between meaning, signals, and the “background noise” of daily life. The title is part of a phrase describing the ratio between transmitted signal and background static. Locating the division between signal and noise, however, proves problematic for the director, for whom this is a recurrent line of questioning. Images reinforce the signal/noise concept, including the snowstorm that opens the director’s screenplay, obscuring the reader’s view of the villagers awaiting apocalypse in a television static effect. Gaiman and McKean reinforce this dominant concept by flooding the text with the “noise” of garbled sentences opening each chapter title page in word combinations without a clear established meaning that, nevertheless, add to the work. All daily life becomes “noise” to the director as he attempts to focus on the “signal” of his final work until the “silence” of death, which concludes both signal and noise.

Another significant grouping of concepts in the work involves the relationship between apocalypse and “apocatastasis,” which is defined in the text as a restoration, or return, to a previous position or condition. Apocalypse is what the director’s villagers most fear, and it is the subject of the director’s film, but he chooses to reframe the apocalyptic situation as not “one big” apocalypse in human history but a series of “little ones” that conclude each human life. Human history operates in a cycle of feared apocalypse resulting in “apocatastasis,” a circular return to original positions to begin the cycle again.

Several situations in Signal to Noise give rise to a discussion of the role and function of artistic creation and the survival of artifacts following the death of their creator. The director notes in dream sequences that he has no offspring and that his films have been his children and loved ones. This suggests that for the director, his “obsession,” film, is a form of “signal” whereby he communicates meaningful aspects of himself. Inanna, in her epilogue, concludes that art exists as a form of necessary communication with the dead, prophetic in its observation of cyclical human history.

Impact

In the late 1980’s, Gaiman and McKean set out to highlight the vast potential of the comics medium and the ways in which comics have matured in subject matter and format. Conceived of as serialized works (rather than graphic novels), works such as Violent Cases and Signal to Noise exemplify new directions in comics. In terms of subject matter, they introduce the psychological first-person narrative and handle universal human themes, including the dark aspects of life and a questioning of the modern human condition. Signal to Noise, in particular, takes on a historical perspective at the approach of the millennium, emphasizing the continuity of human experience over time, and it assumes that comics have the potential gravitas to depict the relationship between the visual arts, including film, drama, and sequential narrative, in a meaningful way.

In terms of format and content, Signal to Noise addresses the boundaries between language and image intrinsic in comics by providing disjunctive, nonlinear text as a form of commentary on image and plot and by necessitating reader participation in establishing interpretation. The multimedia life of the work emphasizes this boundary-crossing possibility in comics, living on in several emended editions, a radio play, and a stage play.

McKean’s innovative and experimental artwork brings a much wider range of media to comics illustration than that of the traditional Golden Age and Silver Age of comics, introducing photography, collage, and computer technology such as text sampling to the medium. McKean’s work has helped raise comics illustration to a level of “high art,” suggesting that comics illustration, as a whole, is intrinsically worthy of classification alongside more established art formats.

While the subject matter of Signal to Noise reinforces nonsuperhero content and presents significant universal human themes as a relevant commentary on modern life, its format establishes visual experimentation and a variety of media as acceptable aspects of comics illustration. McKean’s serialized works Cages (1990-1996) and Pictures That Tick (2009) further explore the relationship between comics illustration and multimedia context.

Further Reading

Gaiman, Neil, and Dave McKean. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1994).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Violent Cases (1987).

McKean, Dave. Cages (1998).

Bibliography

McCabe, Joe. Hanging Out with the Dream King. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2005.

Olsen, Stephen P. The Library of Graphic Novelists: Neil Gaiman. New York: Rosen, 2005.

Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. The Neil Gaiman Reader. Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2007.