Maple Terrace

Maple Terrace #1-3

by Noah Van Sciver

From a multiple-award-winning cartoonist, Noah Van Sciver, comes Maple Terrace, a new autobiographical graphic novel. Based on the author's childhood, Maple Terrace unfolds a tale of big money comic-collecting craze of the early 90s as seen from the ground floor. In a time when superheroes were oversized, adorned with massive guns, and countless pouches, comic books were currency! Young investors struggled to collect every cover gimmick under the sun—embossed-metallic ink-holographic foil—hoping they someday would pay for their college education. Brutally hilarious, Maple Terrace shines a light on the strange intersection between poverty and speculative comic book craze of the 90s.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Graphic Novels Comics

120 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2024

About the author

[copied from: http://nvansciver.wordpress.com/about/]

I am THE one and only Noah Van Sciver, cartoonist/comic strip artist and illustrator. I’m best known for my alternative comic book series Blammo and my weekly comic strip 4 Questions which appears every week in the alternative newspaper Westword. My work has appeared in The Best American comics 2011, Mad magazine, Sunstone, The Comics Journal, MOME and numerous comics anthologies. I’m currently hard at work on my first graphic novel The Hypo which will be published by Fantagraphics books upon its completion. I’m a cancer and I hate seafood, and adventure.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book describes the 'collectors fever' I remember so well! New comics were starting to be looked at as an investment in the '90s; I can still remember the calls I received about Superman #75, people asking me how many copies they should buy! NVS looks at this phenomena through the lens of a boy just trying to fit in at school.

[Rod Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Noah Van Sciver's follow-up to One Dirty Tree better than that book because it stays focused on his childhood instead of jumping around in time, going for a lighter tone with less introspection.

Specifically, it tracks a few bad days in 1992 when a desire to read Spawn #5 started off a series of events that got young Van Sciver into increasing amounts of very mild trouble with his siblings and some neighborhood kids. Adult Van Sciver is effective in showing how huge this schoolyard tempest seems when you are a child.

I'm all for the shenanigans revolving around comic books, though it was very triggering to watch one get torn up. It brings up that dark day my own brother . . . and that innocent issue of Wacky Adventures of Cracky . . . and . . . No, I will be strong!

I appreciate the limited depiction of Ethan Van Sciver, an older brother with some modern-day notoriety, as a dark and menacing figure, but I wish more time had been spent with Van Sciver's unconventional parents.


FOR REFERENCE:

Contains material originally published in single magazine form as Maple Terrace #1-3.

Contents: Sean's Spawn -- Doomsday -- Showdown -- Cover Gallery

[Rick Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A follow up of sorts to One Dirty Tree, Noah Van Sciver dives back into his youth growing up in a packed Mormon household in New Jersey. With Maple Terrace, Van Sciver digs deep into his love of comics from an early age, both from reading comics like Spawn and also obsessing over their potential value as investment items. The attuned charm and wit of Van Sciver's comics bleeds through on every single page, with much of it being of the light-hearted self-deprecating sort. It's fun to see Van Sciver indulging in the more typical comics fare given his more varied output as an artist, something Van Sciver makes abundantly clear with his light jab at Todd McFarlane - "Todd McFarlane is for boys...Barry Windsor-Smith is for men."

Maple Terrace is a light read, but amusing all the way through. Like he did with a previous autobiographic comic, As A Cartoonist, Van Sciver ends the collection with sketches of some of his favorite comics, but this time from his childhood collection. It's no surprise to see Stephen Bissette's Tyrant and Mark Schultz' Cadillac and Dinosaurs as part of the collection given Van Sciver's love of dinosaurs and Jurassic Park as explored in many of his previous works.

[Dair · Rating 5 out of 5]

A combination of sad, funny and relatable make this childhood story a completely worthwhile read. I cannot recommend it enough.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a treat when Van Sciver drops a new comic. This one kind of reads like dlc for those who picked up his other autobio work (One Dirty Tree/As A Cartoonist, etc). This one largely deals with comic collecting but also provides a deeper view into how the other people in his neighborhood/school perceived Noah as a lower-class mormon weirdo.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maple Terrace: Tales From One Dirty Tree (2025) by Noah Van Sciver is an Ignatz Award Nomination for Best Comic Book for 2025. It is short, produced in three parts and collected in one 112-page volume. It is a follow-up to Van Sciver’s One Dirty Tree, with a focus on his childhood. This one dwells, again, on his Mormon family’s poverty and cramped living conditions and his being bullied for the theft of some comic books. Maybe the central issue here is his family’s obsessive interest in comics; for Van Sciver, in the early nineties, it was collecting faves, including in particular 1992’s Spawn #5. It has this manic, alt-comix style with a sort of Rugrats comedic feel to it. This one feels slight to me, but still fun to read, and I can’t wait for the next one.

[Calla Bjorklund Jarvie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was totally ok. I did not like the drawing style, which is huge for me when it comes to graphic novels. The story was ok, too. Just having a hard time generating a lot of enthusiasm for this one.

[Bobine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pas drôle, pas franchement joli, auto centré et humour niche de geek de la bd...

[Dolores · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[A Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

very funny

[Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forgot to log! Library copy. Took me right back to fifth grade.

[Galen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short sweet, really tapped into being a kid reading comics in the 90’s.

[Al McCarty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to like this, it just needs more. More of everything. Too slight for me to care.
Another thing puts me off. I get when the author wants to reproduce the blurbs in their own handwriting, a la Daniel Clowes, et al, but when the author writes with his own hand “…is widely considered one of the best cartoonists of his generation “…that’s ego and hubris. I can’t take anyone seriously after that. I liked Fante Bukowski, but get over yourself, man.