All Around Pennsauken

By Frank Sinatra

Ethan Van Sciver is a very talented artist at DC Comics with a career that spans 17 years.
Van Sciver’s work on several titles, featuring iconic characters including The Flash and Green Lantern, has helped him achieve celebrity status in comic book circles. He’s also a home grown talent, growing up in Merchantville and graduating from Pennsauken High School in 1992. All Around Pennsauken caught up with Ethan as he was signing autographs and drawing commissioned pieces for fans at Wizard World Comic Con Philadelphia.

It’s been a long journey for Van Sciver, who went from a job as a caricaturist at the Cherry Hill Mall to providing the artwork for the “zero issue” of “Convergence,” DC’s kick-off to its summer blockbuster event.

Cyberfrog #1. Photo credit: ComicVine

“It didn’t come quickly or really easily. I started out with this idea that I was going to work in independent comics,” says Van Sciver. “I have my own comic called ‘Cyberfrog.’ I was working on that as a teenager and into my early twenties. Surge Enterprises, the agency that took the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ and developed them into a worldwide phenomenon, they decided they wanted to represent ‘Cyberfrog.’ But nothing really came of it; they got a deal together but it fell apart. I thought that was going to be the end.

“I ended up, just out of necessity, going over to work at DC around 1997. I’ve been there ever since, quite happily.”

Van Sciver broke into DC at the same time as Geoff Johns, who currently serves as DC Comic’s chief creative officer. They’ve collaborated on a variety of projects from the popular one-shot “Flash: Iron Heights” to numerous Green Lantern projects that helped revitalize the franchise and helped spawn a major motion picture.

“He was doing something called, ‘Day of Judgement’ and ‘Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E.;’ and I was working kind of in the same universe doing ‘Impulse,’” says Van Sciver. “He wrote an issue of ‘Impulse’ that I did the cover for and we kind of became friends and talked about doing great stuff together.”

Johns and Van Sciver collaborated on “Green Lantern: Rebirth,” as well as events that lead into the amazingly successful “Blackest Night” event. Van Sciver’s work was action-packed and highly detailed. He spoke about a particular two-page spread in “The Sinestro Corps War,” where the Green Lantern battles a variety of different aliens that have their own variation of the superhero’s powers.

Ethan Van Sciver’s work in “The Sinestro Corps War.” Photo credit: ComicVine.

“It took a long time. I remember the description for that page was very brief. It basically said: ‘Show everybody.’ I had to invent a bunch of characters. It took a long time. I would come up with five or six characters and put it down and work on something else and then come back the next day. And eventually, when it was all finished, I designed the Red Lanterns, the Blue Lanterns, and everybody in between.”

Van Sciver spent time in Orlando for several years and currently resides in North Carolina. But he’s decided to make the move back to New Jersey for the best of reasons: love.

“I’m dating a girl that I met when I was 18. She’s great. Her name’s Andrea. She saw me create ‘Cyberfrog.’ She was right there when all that happened. And she stayed in New Jersey.”

“I’ve been all around the country now; I can’t put my finger on it, but New Jersey is always home,” adds Van Sciver. “I love the culture; I love the food; I love the people.”

For young aspiring artists in Pennsauken and Merchantville hoping to be their generation’s “Ethan Van Sciver,” he offers this advice. “You need to devote all of your time to drawing a comic book. Draw your own book. Work on it diligently every day. Try to do a page a day. Put it in front of people and let people look at it. Show it to your friends. Something that kids have now that I didn’t have in 1993 when I started was the Internet. It’s very easy to get published digitally and very easy to show off your work that way. And I would recommend that they do that. It’s a good way to get attention from publishers and other creative people.”

Ethan Van Sciver posts artwork on his fan page on Facebook and is currently at Wizard World Comic Con Philadelphia, which runs until Sunday.