Anyone with concerns about life and death and the eventual result of all our plans and ambitions should read this book. This is one of the better graphic novels I've ever read in my life. I don't want to do that, so I'll leave it here. I feel like I'm dancing around it in this review, rather than saying straight out what their point was, but I partly feel like I couldn't say it straight out if I wanted to, and I also feel like even a concentrated attempt to spell it out might ruin the book for future readers. I don't know why I didn't understand what Gaiman and McKean were going for with it upon first reading, but all that's important is that I got it this time. This chapter adds a different perspective to the rest of the book that helps make sense of it, and gives certain parts greater clarity. The rest of the book takes place in the early 90s, and this chapter is the thoughts, upon the arrival of the year 2000, of the woman who produced the director's movies. What helps even more is the inclusion in this edition of a final epilogue called 'Milennium'. McKean's cut-up illustration style on this particular book underscores this thought process to dramatic effect. This is where the concept of the title comes in-the director spends a lot of time thinking about clear ideas and plans being drowned out by the chaos and randomness of the world. He seems to regret having lost the opportunity to do more, to have as long a life as he'd always planned to have. This dovetails with his thoughts and fears about his own death. He's fascinated by the idea of a culture preparing for the end of the world, one that quite obviously did not come. The film is about the pre-milennial tensions and social unrest that gripped Europe in the year 999 AD. While sitting around his house, slowly growing sicker, he sketches out the idea for his final film, one that he now assumes will never be made. He reacts to this by refusing all treatment and going home to wait for death. The more overt plot concerns a film director who has learned, at the age of not quite 50, that he's got a malignant, cancerous tumor, and will almost certainly die, and soon. The second time through, I really connected with the story Gaiman and McKean were trying to tell.

At the time, I didn't really get it, and I hoped that reading it in this new edition might make it easier for me to understand. I'd read the story once before, though as an internet download of scanned pages rather than in an actual bound edition. We were slow, and it's short, so I figured I could get through it in an hour or so.

My store received a copy of this new hardcover edition of 'Signal to Noise' just the other day, and before shelving it, I decided to read it.