From left to right: Ethan Van Sciver, Sharis Van Sciver, Chris Ward, Jack Kirby’s ghost.

My greatest memory of working at Wizard Magazine was writing a large feature piece on world famous comic book artist, Ethan Van Sciver (who also happens to be one of the best “humorists” of my day, and I remain eternally jealous of his wit and talent). In 2005, he won Artist of the Year for his incredible work on Green Lantern: Rebirth. God, has it been almost 5 years? Anyway, we spent the day goofing around at Universal Studios, where I got my tape recorder wet on a Rocky & Bullwinkle flume ride and destroyed it, forcing us to table all interviews and serious business activity until later in the day. What terrible luck.

I won’t go into how we almost got kicked out of the park that morning, but I will do the next best thing: I will reveal, for the first time ever, two really, really funny Ethan Van Sciver stories that simply wouldn’t fit in an Artist of the Year feature.

I found it while digging through some old material, and laughed my ass off at these unbelievable comedy/tragedies, painstakingly transcribed by an unknown, unpaid Wizard intern (thanks, by the way, whoever you were. I hate transcribing interviews).

(TAPE STARTS)

CW: Now, did you ever tell me about any cool pranks that you did [before my tape recorder got wet]?

EVS: Oh, did you get those on tape?

CW: I don’t even know. You mentioned a goat in you kitchen or something…I don’t know if that was a prank.

EVS: That wasn’t a prank, that was god preying on us…

Click through for the craziest story you’ll read this half-hour!

EVS: This was during the making of The Flash: Iron Heights, and we were living in this house up in the Catskills, in a ski town. The people up there were very standoffish. Sharis cannot cope with that, because Sharis will immediately go up to the neighbors and say “Hi, I’m Sharis Van Sciver, you know if you need a pie…” That’s who she is, she wants to be friends with everybody, and they would say “Well we hope you are private people because we really like our privacy,” so it was immediately like “okay, we’re all alone up here.”

Anyway, we were renting from this guy named…can’t tell you what his name is…we’re renting from this grizzled old kind of coal miner looking fellow, and he had a key to our house and he would come in and just check to make sure we weren’t destroying the house and so on and so forth.

I worked down in the basement, I mean this cellar type basement—I hung black sheets all around my desk so that I wouldn’t have to see the piping and everything—and I just worked in this black box all during the end of my run on Impulse. I was working on Impulse #67, maybe, and I had the first page finished penciled on my desk. I was really proud of it, it was a cool page.

Sharis and I went out somewhere, when I came home the page was gone.

Now, it couldn’t have gone anywhere and I know it was there because I pay attention to where my artwork is. It’s like, I know when I have a page done. Believe me, it weighs heavily on my mind.

The landlord said, “I will be swinging by just to check on things,” so clearly to anyone who is thinking about this, our landlord must have taken this page of artwork. No, he never told me he was a comic book fan.

It’s very confusing to me.

So, I called him up and said, “Hey, so you said you were going to stop by…I had a page of artwork on my desk and, I don’t know, maybe you accidentally put it in your briefcase or something? Anything could happen.”

He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t even go down there, what are you nuts? Why would I take your comic book artwork?”

And I said, “Yeah, see that’s what I want to know. But I think that you did because it’s gone and who else would take it?”

And he got very defensive and said, “Well, you know, I think YOU’RE nuts,” and hung up the phone.

Well, I think he did it.

So, I called the police, and I said, “You’re never gonna believe this…this is the weirdest thing in the world. My landlord snuck into my house and stole of page of artwork off my desk featuring Max Mercury carrying Helen across Mt. Rushmore”

Very strange thing for somebody to do, very strange behavior. But I think he did it and I didn’t know how to get it back. The cop said “Well, let me give him a call at work and, in the meantime, say we have surveillance cameras that caught you doing it.”

So, I said, “all right.”

So, the police officer called and sort of threatened the landlord, and then the landlord called me back and said, “Now you’ve got the cops calling my work and what’s going on!!”  You know, “screw you” and so on and so forth cursing and yelling. And I said, “You know, I have surveillance cameras in the basement and I caught you on tape doing it, now return my artwork this minute” and he was flustered and crazy, hung up the phone on me right after he says “I’ll be right over we’ll straighten this out.”

So, he comes over and sure enough he’s got my artwork and it’s rolled up and covered in tin foil, and I said “What possessed you to do this? How dare you sir!” He looked at me, he got in my face and he hissed through gray teeth, he says “I SHOULD HAVE BURNED IT!” And then ran away.

Like, he ran out the door, got in his car and VROMMMMMMM!!!, you know peeled out of there. “I should have burned it!!!”

I said, “Sharis we gotta get of here, were in nut country. I mean, we are in an insane place and we gotta get somewhere where this guy can’t find us ever again.” So Sharis says “What should we do, should we buy a house?”

Not too long before this, our basement flooded…destroying my original art collection. Insurance was good enough to pay for it all, we had a check and we could probably afford to put a down payment on a house. Sharis decides she wants to look at tax seizures, and finds a 5 bedroom house, 3 bathrooms.

It’s ten thousand dollars, cash, because it was seized and that’s what they owed apparently.

And it’s further up the road.

In other words, further up the mountain. Deeper into nut country.

PART II: DEEPER INTO NUT COUNTRY

So, we gotta go look at this place. Now, I have been up all night…this is a Saturday morning, 10am. I’m pushing being awake for 30 hours. Sharis calls the real estate agent, who’s gonna come over and take us up to see this house, because “we have to snatch it up right away! It’s a bargain! it’s an amazing deal!”

So, she drives up this twisty turny path, about 15 miles away from our old house, way in the mountains. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Trees everywhere, flocks of deer running in the road and everything as rural as possible.

It couldn’t be worse.

She pulls over in front of this blue house that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss children’s book, it’s leaning this way and it’s very tall and narrow, and its just…there a little bit of back yard and then all the houses on this street 90 angle degree mountains, straight up. Like you wouldn’t believe.

The real estate lady pulls over and says, “I think this is it. Now, Ethan, the house was seized and the people were forcibly evicted, so god knows what’s in there. I mean, who knows what they were forced to leave behind. But whatever, for the ten thousand dollars, it’s all yours.”

I said “This doesn’t really look like a 5 bedroom house to me,” and she says “well it is…so…it probably looks bigger on the inside.”

She says, “Now, it’s been locked, so you’re going to have to use a screwdriver to jimmy your way in.”

So, I stick the screwdriver in the front door and, no, it’s not gonna open.

So, she says, “maybe there’s another way to get in. Why don’t you jump up there?”

Okay. You have to picture the house is leaning this way…there’s a garage right here and then a bedroom window right here, so if I climb up on the garage I can get in through the bedroom, using the screwdriver.

…I’m, like, walking dazed, as though in a dream, in a trance. Like, Bela Lugosi has me in a trance.

I’m doing what this crazy woman asks me to do.

I climb up on top of the garage I stick the screwdriver in the window pane, because I’m about to sort of try and jimmy open the window. What happens? The whole thing falls apart like wet cake. Like plaster, all over my feet. It’s wet pine wood, okay, rotten to the core.

It shatters everywhere, it just falls apart.

I’m like, “Hey, you know the window just…” and she’s like, “That’s okay, for what you’re paying for it, who cares?” I was like, “you’re right.” So, I go in the window and I look inside with a flashlight. I’m like, “Lady, there’s a bed in this room, and it’s made. It’s got a quilt on it.”

She’s like, “Well, it’s yours! You know, like I said, who knows what these people left behind…they were in a hurry and they couldn’t take the bed. Climb in, come down the stairs, open the door and let us in.”

Which is what I did.

The place is really nice and furnished! There were, like, animal heads on the walls. These people were hunters. So, I come down the stairs, I open the door I let them in and it sure is nicer on the inside than it was on the outside. We’re looking around, and she’s like “Wow! This place is fully furnished and everything! It’s yours, this is great!” I’m like, “Look there’s a refrigerator in the kitchen here!” I open the refrigerator, and the light comes on. Which means the house has electricity. The refrigerator light is on, there’s beer and cheese in the fridge…

Oh my god.

It’s the wrong house.

CW: (LAUGHS) Oh shit.

…This woman, this real estate agent, gets in her car and peels out of the driveway, 100 miles an hour up the road.

Sharis and I are baffled, and we follow her. We follow her up the road and she pulls over into an Indian Reservation. Now this woman is out of her car chain smoking and pacing, “Oh my god ,I’m going to lose my job.” So, I’m sitting in the back seat again, like “What in the world is happening?” Like, just seeing little birds over my head because I’m so tired.

Sharis says, “What do we do? What do we do?”

I’m like, “Let me think…okay.”

The real estate lady says, “If you tell my boss, I’m going to get fired, you can’t tell my boss.”

I’m like, “Lady, we broke into somebody’s house. And the thing about it is, is that WE are sensitive about people breaking into our houses because of my Impulse page getting stolen! We felt really violated!”

So we felt doubly awful for whoever owned this house.

Not only that, they had animal heads on their walls. These people were hunters. If they were home they would have blown my head off. It was an absolutely insane thing to do.

“You can’t tell, you can’t tell, you can’t tell,” she says.

So, I’m like, “Lady we have to tell, we have to leave them a note. ‘So sorry we broke into your house, it was a mistake.’ So, we wrote it on a paper plate and left it on the door and this woman was begging us not too.

And then it’s like, “I need 175 dollars for the window.”

(some chatter, hard to hear)

EVS: Well the guy called me later and said, “if you don’t give us the money there’s going to be trouble.”

And I’m like, “I guess there’s trouble.”

(END TAPE)

And that’s it! That’s how the tape ends! I need Ethan to clarify the ending, as the intern apparently couldn’t hear above all the ruckus (we were watching Challenge of the Superfriends during this story). Until then, I’m just going to assume Ethan. Killed. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.

Pictured: Ethan Van Sciver

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