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The Mess
A family death and a missing Picasso send a mother and son on an unexpected spring break that threatens to permanently damage their relationship ― if they survive the trip!
When her semi-estranged and penniless hoarder father dies, Erin Messina is tasked with cleaning out his house before the bank forecloses on it. This otherwise thankless task is given a purpose, however, when she remembers the original Picasso drawing her father was gifted in 1964. She enlists her teenage son, Jackson, to spend spring break looking for their possible ticket to long-term financial stability.
Jackson, resentful and eager to shirk responsibility, befriends twin skateboarders who live in the hood, and tell him about the violent murder that happened directly across the street from his grandfather’s home ― and the murderer who still lives there. Emotional baggage, paranoia, and frayed nerves stretch the Messina’s relationship to the brink, as The Mess careens to a thrilling final act that includes… two-way radio communication with the dead?
Over the past decade, Noah Van Sciver has established himself as the most versatile graphic novelist working today. Whether it be in the service of straight-up satire (Fante Bukowski, Beat It, Rufus!), serious historical nonfiction (Joseph Smith and the Mormons, The The Melancholic Young Lincoln), autobiography (As a Cartoonist, One Dirty Tree), or books for younger readers (Calamity Before Jane, Johnny Appleseed), Van Sciver’s singular voice and style has proven remarkably malleable to the needs of each project.
With The Mess, Van Sciver stakes yet new creative ground as a fiction writer, crafting the most magnetic and literary work of his career. The Mess is a brilliant, original graphic novel infused with drama, laughs, pathos, and suspense, beautifully drawn and colored in Van Sciver’s immersive and intimate style.
Full color illustrations throughout
When her semi-estranged and penniless hoarder father dies, Erin Messina is tasked with cleaning out his house before the bank forecloses on it. This otherwise thankless task is given a purpose, however, when she remembers the original Picasso drawing her father was gifted in 1964. She enlists her teenage son, Jackson, to spend spring break looking for their possible ticket to long-term financial stability.
Jackson, resentful and eager to shirk responsibility, befriends twin skateboarders who live in the hood, and tell him about the violent murder that happened directly across the street from his grandfather’s home ― and the murderer who still lives there. Emotional baggage, paranoia, and frayed nerves stretch the Messina’s relationship to the brink, as The Mess careens to a thrilling final act that includes… two-way radio communication with the dead?
Over the past decade, Noah Van Sciver has established himself as the most versatile graphic novelist working today. Whether it be in the service of straight-up satire (Fante Bukowski, Beat It, Rufus!), serious historical nonfiction (Joseph Smith and the Mormons, The The Melancholic Young Lincoln), autobiography (As a Cartoonist, One Dirty Tree), or books for younger readers (Calamity Before Jane, Johnny Appleseed), Van Sciver’s singular voice and style has proven remarkably malleable to the needs of each project.
With The Mess, Van Sciver stakes yet new creative ground as a fiction writer, crafting the most magnetic and literary work of his career. The Mess is a brilliant, original graphic novel infused with drama, laughs, pathos, and suspense, beautifully drawn and colored in Van Sciver’s immersive and intimate style.
Full color illustrations throughout
- GenresComicsGraphic Novels
168 pages, Hardcover
Published September 29, 2026
About the author
Noah Van Sciver
95 books213 followers[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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Noah Van Sciver’s latest graphic novel, The Mess, is propelled by a series of contrasts: one house is filled with love, the other with hate; one home rejected its daughter; the other cannot release its lover, who died there; one is estranged, the other hungry to connect. There is endurance and resignation, clear-headed acceptance, and hope masking delusion.
A middle-aged woman named Erin Messina returns to her father’s home to claim what she wants of its contents before the bank takes possession of it. Estranged from her father, a hoarder, she hadn’t been to the house in half a lifetime. Her son—15-ish, say—never met his grandfather. Not having any emotional connection to the house, Jackson, her son, would rather skateboard than help her sort through heaps of useless stuff. Two things make Jackson's stay in the dusty old house tolerable: The possibility that his grandfather owned a drawing by Picasso—which, if true, could substantially help the family’s finances—and the fact that he meets two local skateboarders.
Older and better than Jackson, and on the verge of an endorsement deal, the twins deign to allow Jackson to hang out with them. Jackson’s techniques improve, and the twins introduce him to pot, which he is reluctant to try at first, but the pull of adolescent rules of social engagement will have its way. Still, that’s fine until they also show Jackson their interest in breaking and entering. Armed.
Across the street lives a man whose house has become a frequent target of vandalism over rumors that he killed his roommate in that house and got away with it. His story eventually intertwines with Erin and Jackson’s.
Although the environment and events feel grim, few matters are sure things in The Mess. Van Sciver’s characters are too nuanced and his freedom from generic plotting is too great for the story to become predictable. His pacing and framing of the events are excellent. Van Sciver knows how to tell a compelling story. Do the characters get what they want—and, if so, at what cost?
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
A middle-aged woman named Erin Messina returns to her father’s home to claim what she wants of its contents before the bank takes possession of it. Estranged from her father, a hoarder, she hadn’t been to the house in half a lifetime. Her son—15-ish, say—never met his grandfather. Not having any emotional connection to the house, Jackson, her son, would rather skateboard than help her sort through heaps of useless stuff. Two things make Jackson's stay in the dusty old house tolerable: The possibility that his grandfather owned a drawing by Picasso—which, if true, could substantially help the family’s finances—and the fact that he meets two local skateboarders.
Older and better than Jackson, and on the verge of an endorsement deal, the twins deign to allow Jackson to hang out with them. Jackson’s techniques improve, and the twins introduce him to pot, which he is reluctant to try at first, but the pull of adolescent rules of social engagement will have its way. Still, that’s fine until they also show Jackson their interest in breaking and entering. Armed.
Across the street lives a man whose house has become a frequent target of vandalism over rumors that he killed his roommate in that house and got away with it. His story eventually intertwines with Erin and Jackson’s.
Although the environment and events feel grim, few matters are sure things in The Mess. Van Sciver’s characters are too nuanced and his freedom from generic plotting is too great for the story to become predictable. His pacing and framing of the events are excellent. Van Sciver knows how to tell a compelling story. Do the characters get what they want—and, if so, at what cost?
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
October 29, 2026
#gifted
Death of a “loved one” is almost universally a hardship to bear, but sometimes the toll isn’t an emotional one; sometimes it’s a purely physical one, to deal with the mess they’ve left behind. In The Mess, Erin Messina must deal with the physical mess of an estranged father who gave up on her after her mother died, a father who kicked her out at 17 and left her to fend for herself.
Inside the house in a rundown neighborhood in New Hampshire, Erin and her 15-year-old son Jackson expect to find an original Picasso drawing her father Frank received from Picasso himself, but they arrive to find the biohazard house of a hoarder, full of trash, accumulated junk and dead mice, all of which needs to be methodically searched through to find the priceless (“a million bucks”) drawing.
Erin is resigned to this fate, knowing the drawing could be life-changing for her family; Jack is horrified. He’s cagey and circumspect, doesn’t want any part of this endeavor, no matter how life-altering it might turn out to be. He’s a punk kid with green hair, but one from a good suburban home, not a latchkey kid or from the gutter. Instead of staying in this filth, he begs his mom to get an Airbnb, but it’s beyond their means until they find that Picasso.
Erin and Jack, despite being his clean-up crew, have skipped the funeral. In fact, Jack has never met the old man before, he tells the pair of delinquent semi-pro skateboarder twins he meets in the neighborhood, Cody and Spencer, who know more about his grandfather than he does. Weird guy, they tell him, always walked around wearing an ascot. Jack spends as much time as he can away from the house, shredding with the twins around town, or on the homemade vert ramp in their backyard, learning new tricks, both on and off his board. They are the kind of latchkey kids, raised without fear of losing their good life to really take the kind of risks Jack wishes he was able to go for on his board and in his life as a whole, but he’s got comfort imbued in his spirit: he’s running from a dead mouse, not a dead grandfather that he never knew.
Into all of this, comes Marcus, a quiet guy who lives across the street, who keeps to himself. Someone has spraypainted MURDERER across the front of his house. Is it true? It’s what the neighbors believe anyway. Marcus is a scientist of sorts, but the kind other scientists would call a quack: he’s spending his time in his basement trying to develop a method to contact the dead by tuning into their radio frequencies, to hopefully pick up a signal from Alan, his boyfriend who died, that everyone thinks he murdered.
When he helps Erin jumpstart her car on the side of the road one night she begins to question the veracity of the all-knowing neighborhood gossip’s graffiti. He seems pretty nice, but pretty shy and maybe a little too awkward with people.
Erin herself is harder to get a handle on, so singular is her focus on finding the Picasso sketch for a better life for her and Jack before the impending deadline of Monday morning, when the bank repossesses the house. Ghosts encroach on her space, but she shuts her eyes and bats then away. There is the visual metaphor of taking care of her father’s garbage -- literally packing it up in bags and taking it to the curb -- but the details are light, one has to fill them out with supposition (which is not that difficult).
Noah Van Sciver (absolutely not to be confused with his brother, whose name I’d rather not say) is a top tier cartoonist and writer, who has been nominated for an Eisner Award and many Ignatz Awards, and has won an Ignatz Brick in 2016 for Outstanding Story. He continues that trajectory here in The Mess, looking at death from an angle you don’t often see, the oblique view: death tries its best to make eye contact with these characters, but most do their best to avoid it. It’s closer to the way I think a lot of us actually process grief, in a delayed way, putting it off until it hurts less, sometimes for years before finally taking it by the shoulders, looking right into its eyes and saying “okay, let's get this over with already.”
Death of a “loved one” is almost universally a hardship to bear, but sometimes the toll isn’t an emotional one; sometimes it’s a purely physical one, to deal with the mess they’ve left behind. In The Mess, Erin Messina must deal with the physical mess of an estranged father who gave up on her after her mother died, a father who kicked her out at 17 and left her to fend for herself.
Inside the house in a rundown neighborhood in New Hampshire, Erin and her 15-year-old son Jackson expect to find an original Picasso drawing her father Frank received from Picasso himself, but they arrive to find the biohazard house of a hoarder, full of trash, accumulated junk and dead mice, all of which needs to be methodically searched through to find the priceless (“a million bucks”) drawing.
Erin is resigned to this fate, knowing the drawing could be life-changing for her family; Jack is horrified. He’s cagey and circumspect, doesn’t want any part of this endeavor, no matter how life-altering it might turn out to be. He’s a punk kid with green hair, but one from a good suburban home, not a latchkey kid or from the gutter. Instead of staying in this filth, he begs his mom to get an Airbnb, but it’s beyond their means until they find that Picasso.
Erin and Jack, despite being his clean-up crew, have skipped the funeral. In fact, Jack has never met the old man before, he tells the pair of delinquent semi-pro skateboarder twins he meets in the neighborhood, Cody and Spencer, who know more about his grandfather than he does. Weird guy, they tell him, always walked around wearing an ascot. Jack spends as much time as he can away from the house, shredding with the twins around town, or on the homemade vert ramp in their backyard, learning new tricks, both on and off his board. They are the kind of latchkey kids, raised without fear of losing their good life to really take the kind of risks Jack wishes he was able to go for on his board and in his life as a whole, but he’s got comfort imbued in his spirit: he’s running from a dead mouse, not a dead grandfather that he never knew.
Into all of this, comes Marcus, a quiet guy who lives across the street, who keeps to himself. Someone has spraypainted MURDERER across the front of his house. Is it true? It’s what the neighbors believe anyway. Marcus is a scientist of sorts, but the kind other scientists would call a quack: he’s spending his time in his basement trying to develop a method to contact the dead by tuning into their radio frequencies, to hopefully pick up a signal from Alan, his boyfriend who died, that everyone thinks he murdered.
When he helps Erin jumpstart her car on the side of the road one night she begins to question the veracity of the all-knowing neighborhood gossip’s graffiti. He seems pretty nice, but pretty shy and maybe a little too awkward with people.
Erin herself is harder to get a handle on, so singular is her focus on finding the Picasso sketch for a better life for her and Jack before the impending deadline of Monday morning, when the bank repossesses the house. Ghosts encroach on her space, but she shuts her eyes and bats then away. There is the visual metaphor of taking care of her father’s garbage -- literally packing it up in bags and taking it to the curb -- but the details are light, one has to fill them out with supposition (which is not that difficult).
Noah Van Sciver (absolutely not to be confused with his brother, whose name I’d rather not say) is a top tier cartoonist and writer, who has been nominated for an Eisner Award and many Ignatz Awards, and has won an Ignatz Brick in 2016 for Outstanding Story. He continues that trajectory here in The Mess, looking at death from an angle you don’t often see, the oblique view: death tries its best to make eye contact with these characters, but most do their best to avoid it. It’s closer to the way I think a lot of us actually process grief, in a delayed way, putting it off until it hurts less, sometimes for years before finally taking it by the shoulders, looking right into its eyes and saying “okay, let's get this over with already.”
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
The most ambitious literary fiction of Noah Van Sciver’s career. A must read.
October 22, 2026
What else can you say he is just a great cartoonist.
October 30, 2026
3 compelling characters in such a short time, this book felt haunting, but so good. Could not have predicted that end 🥲
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews