Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver draws the way a storm rolls in—inevitable, gathering force, and leaving you somewhere you didn’t expect. Over two decades, this Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist has moved from a tender Abraham Lincoln biopic to a savage takedown of literary pretension to a 464-page epic about the founder of Mormonism without breaking stride. His expressive, cross-hatched linework seems to breathe on the page, animated by a darkly humane sense of humor and an abiding tenderness for characters in their most gloriously flawed and broken places.

Early Life and Career

Born the second-youngest of eight in a large Mormon family in New Jersey, Van Sciver was steeped in comics from childhood. He flirted with “serious” painting for a spell, but a double dose of Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb and the Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor detonated something in him—revealing that comics could map the messy, human, unheroic corners of life. At 22, he landed in Denver and began self-publishing minicomics, selling them on street corners and in coffee shops one hand-drawn page at a time. That scrappy, DIY spirit crystallized in his one-person anthology Blammo, an Eisner-nominated labor of love that became his calling card and caught the eye of Fantagraphics.

His debut graphic novel, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln (Fantagraphics, 2012), reimagined Abraham Lincoln’s early years as a study in depression and vaulting ambition, landing on Best-of-2012 lists from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, MTV Geek, and Boing Boing. He pivoted hard with Saint Cole (Fantagraphics, 2015), a raw suburban tragedy that stings like a paper cut to the soul. Then came the character that would become his signature: Fante Bukowski, a monumentally delusional aspiring writer who is somehow, against all odds, weirdly lovable. The three-volume Fante Bukowski saga earned multiple Eisner nominations; The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski (2020)—a 464-page brick of beautiful failure—was hailed by the AV Club as “a compelling trainwreck” and earned yet another Eisner nod for Best Writer/Artist.

In 2016, his autobiographical mini-comic My Hot Date (Kilgore Books) won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story—and in the same year Van Sciver earned an Eisner nomination for Best Writer/Artist for Fante Bukowski. His short fiction has graced the pages of The New Yorker, Wired, The Believer, Best American Comics, The Comics Journal, and numerous anthologies. He was a longtime regular at MAD Magazine starting in 2011, wielding his nib pen alongside the greats of American satire.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons

His magnum opus arrived in 2022: Joseph Smith and the Mormons (Abrams ComicArts), a 464-page full-color graphic biography of the founder of the Latter-day Saint movement. Raised in the faith himself, Van Sciver spent years researching and rendering this book with the patience of a jeweler setting stones. Publishers Weekly called it “a nuanced graphic biography” and “an exemplar graphic narrative, reminiscent of Chester Brown’s Louis Riel.” The Comics Journal praised its radical empathy—its willingness to let characters express doubt, dissembling, and anger while still leaving room for genuine belief.

What’s next? The Mess, a story about a mother and son confronting family tragedy and a missing Picasso on spring break, lands from Fantagraphics in September 2026. If Van Sciver’s track record is any guide, it’ll be funny, painful, and gloriously unpredictable.

Van Sciver lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he keeps a disciplined 9-to-5 drawing schedule—the steady heartbeat behind work that’s been translated into more than six languages. He invites readers into his creative orbit through an active Patreon and YouTube channel, where process nerds can watch a master at work.

Perfect for fans of the empathetic misanthropy of Daniel Clowes, the historical graphic novels of Chester Brown, the working-class grit of Harvey Pekar, and the alt-comedy sensibilities of The Simpsons at its most literary.