In eulogies which alternate between respect, praise and villification, the Dream Lord's character is summed up and his flaws laid bare to, literally, all the world. In this story within a story characters from the series meet to remember and pay their respects to the fallen immortal. The first three cover the actual wake of Morpheus, King of Dreams. Sandman: The Wake is comprised of the last six issues of the regular Sandman comic book series. More importantly the threads that he began to spin in the very first issue are now brought together and tied together in a loose bundle that wraps the whole package up nicely and yet leaves him the option to slip another present into the bundle at some later date. For the first time in comic book history, a profitable on-going series was being brought to a conclusion. When Neal Gaiman penned the seventy-fifth issue of The Sandman he made history in two ways. But he still pointlessly works it out in his head, making a film that no one will ever see. His life’s crowning achievement, his greatest film, would have told the story of a European village as the last hour of AD 999 approached – the midnight which the villagers were convinced would bring with it Armageddon.

It tells the story of a film director, somewhere in London, dying of cancer. Originally commissioned and serialised in The Face, the comic strip Signal to Noise was then expanded and revised for its launch on the VG Graphics list in 1992 with an introduction by Jonathan Caroll. It tells you things you don’t want to know but then twists you inside out by saying, look harder and see the poignance, the beauty of light dancing on life’s edge, truth that is as simple and direct as death’ Jonathan Carroll, from his introduction.

Signal to noise neil gaiman