COMIC REVIEW - THE SIGNAL MAN

Title: THE SIGNAL MAN

Format: A4 B/W

Length: 32 PAGES

Price: £8 UK - £12 US

Publisher: BLACK BOAR PRESS

Creators: WRITTEN BY JASON COBLEY & ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID HITCHCOCK

Available from: black_boar1@yahoo.com

Review:

This wonderful comic is adapted from the spooky short prose story by Charles Dickens. Although not Dickens’ most famous work, it may well be his most well known short story. You might know it (as I did) from the excellent BBC dramatised version from the early 1970s, or various radio readings if not from the original source.

If you don’t know the story, I won’t spoil it for you here, save to say that it involves the creepy goings on at a manned signal box in a lonely railway cutting in the early Victorian period. It has that brilliant quality that all the best ghost stories have, of keeping it unclear how much is supernatural and how much is in the characters’ own heads. It walks a fine line between nailing down the rules of this haunting and nothing being certain at all.

What is important about this tale is that Dickens was exploring something about the human mind that hadn’t at that time even been given a name. It’s clear from the subtext of this story that Dickens was writing about post-traumatic stress disorder. It would be over fifty years after this before it would even be given the name ‘shell-shock’.

Cobley and Hitchcock give this version full room to breath and take it’s own time. Some comic adaptations of prose can be terribly rushed, but not here. This uncomplicated, but never boring tales unwinds itself at it’s own pace. Building tension and atmosphere as it goes.

Of course Hitchcock is the master of Victorian horror and so this story is a perfect project for him. His beautifully rendered pencil art surrounds the characters (and so the reader) with an oppressive mood. His characters look terrified and so we are unsettled. The shining eyes of his rats with their dark coats gnaw at the edges of our vision. The cold breath of the characters against the shadows chills our blood. There is a naturalness to his art. Unlike some others nothing seems forced and he seems able to drawn anything the story asks him to very well indeed.

Well worth a look.

John A. Short