Born in New Jersey in 1984, Noah has lived in Arizona, Colorado and Vermont. Now in Ohio, he will soon be moving to North Carolina.
From a numerous, modest, mormon, one-parent family, Noah Van Sciver shares with one of his favourite fictional character, Fante Bukowski, the strong desire to be renowned for his work. First he meets his elder by 20 years, the inevitable John Porcellino, with whom he’ll be going around librairies selling and buying comic books. Is there a better way to learn the job… We guess not.
His career begins with his self-publishing of Blammo in 2006. The comics are, at first, distributed by hand in Denver’s surroundings. Since its fifth issue, in 2009, it is published by Kilgore Books, an independant label and library from Denver. 2018 saw published issue number 10.
In 2007, he starts a comic-strip called 4 Questions for Westword. He’ll be writing for this magazine from Denver until it stopped in 2016. We can see his work appearing at many publishers since 2011, such as Mad Magazine, The Comics Journal, Mome and Mineshaft. Since then, led by an enormous production rythm with wide range thematics (autobiography, historical narrations, fictions, weekly comics), his work has been published by various editors, small and big ones, including Fantagraphics, while (still) self-publishing many stories. His story Abby’s road, first published in Blammo #6, appears in the 2012’s issue of the anthology The Best american Comics.
From 2015 to 2016 he had a fellowship at the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) in Vermont (U.S.A), where, among other things, he met Chuck Forsman (author of The end of the fucking world).
Since a couple of years, we can read his work in Europe as well. His Fante Bukowski has been tranlated into french (at L’Employé du Moi) and italian (at Fandango Editore). Far from neglecting small publishers, Noah Van Sciver also collaborates to Bento, a french graphic magazine published by Radio as Paper.
(Thanks to L’Employé du Moi for this huuuuuuge partneship to get Noah Van Sciver with us during both PFC#6 and the Festival International de bande dessinée d’Angoulême)
Online : nvansciver.wordpress.com
(more infos also on the collective art show “Indie Americans”, courtesy of Ça et Là et L’Employé du Moi publishers : http://employe-du-moi.org/indie_americans/Noah-Van-Sciver)
Bibliography :
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Blammo (comics, 10 issues, Kilgore Books & Comics)
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The Hypo : The Melancholic Young Lincoln (Fantagraphics, 2012)
• Fante Bukowski (Fantagraphics, 2015)
• Fante Bukowski Two (Fantagraphics, 2017)
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St. Cole (Fantagraphics, 2015)
• My Hot Date (Kilgore Books & Comics, 2015)
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Disquiet (Fantagraphics, 2016)
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Johnny Appleseed (Fantagraphics, 2017)
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Fante Bukowski Three : A Perfect Failure (Fantagraphics, 2018)
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Constant Companion, (Fantagraphics, 2018)
