As a Cartoonist by Noah Van Sciver Review

I love me some Noah Van Sciver but his latest collection, As a Cartoonist, was very weak with few strips in it that were entertaining or funny.

The 19th Century Cartoonist was elaborately drawn but was very tedious and unfunny. Mellow Mutt was about One Dirty Tree-era Noah and his friend, a talking plastic dinosaur, that was just dull. He relates a forgettable episode of when he went to a comics festival in 2016, and we learn about his promiscuous little brother Jonah, in a story that I think was meant to be hilarious and really wasn’t.

The story about his time at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont was ok - he’s as fed up with PC-nonsense as much as anyone - and, though he says he can’t draw scenery well, there are some gorgeous pages of landscapes that prove otherwise. There are a lot of other random unimpressive sketches though that I think are included here to beef up the already quite spare page count.

His strip on seeing a copy of his first graphic novel, The Hypo, remaindered in a bookshop and conflicting art standards wasn’t bad, as was his story about touring his then-latest book, Saint Cole, in France. I don’t know anything about Noah’s personal life so it was nice to see, after so many strips about his various wanderings, he’s now settled down and got a wife, Amy, and a son, Remy, whom this book is dedicated to.

Noah’s books are generally brilliant but As a Cartoonist was disappointingly lacking in good material and read like a collection of stuff that was scraping the bottom of the barrel. If you’re a fan and looking to check this one out, don’t expect much. If you’re interested in this creator and haven’t read them yet, I recommend his better collections, Please Don’t Step On My JNCO Jeans and Youth is Wasted, instead.