Here is a sentence from Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860-2000:
Just as Vickery has been turned into a three-dimensional negative by an electrical storm, the war dead survived, by the industrial light and magic of cinema, as so many shaky on-screen images, not so much signs whose referents have disappeared as mummies.
I was wondering whether there is something missing here concerning "so much signs". Should it be "so much by signs"? Or how to understand the last part?