| Al Hewetson | |
|---|---|
| Died | January 6, 2004 |
| Nationality | Scottish-Canadian |
| Area(s) | Writer, Editor |
| Pseudonym(s) | Joe Dentyn, Stuart Williams, Henry Bergman, Hugh Laskey, Harvey Lazarus, Howie Anderson, Peter Cappiello, Edward Farthing, Victor Buckley |
| Notable works | Skywald Publications |
Al Hewetson (circa 1947 - January 6, 2004)[1] was a Scottish-Canadian writer and editor of American horror-comics magazines, best known for his work with the 1970s publisher Skywald Publications, where he created what he termed the magazines' "Horror-Mood" sensibility. He went on to become a publisher of city magazines in Canada.
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Al Hewetson was initially raised in Glasgow, Scotland, where he read comic books including Classics Illustrated, The Beano and Eagle. While still a child, he moved with his family to Canada, where he began reading the satirical Mad and Humbug magazines, becoming infatuated with the work of writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman. Through his involvement in comics fandom, he began corresponding with such future underground and alternative comics creators as Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch, Robert Crumb, and Art Spiegelman, and published a single issue of a fanzine, The Potrzebie Annual (no relation to fellow fan Bhob Stewart's Potrzebie).[2]
He became a staff news photographer for what was then the Sudbury Daily Star of Sudbury, Ontario, followed by photographer jobs at the Ottawa Journal, The Montreal Gazette in 1967, and Ottawa's Canadian Press.[3] Hoping to start a humor magazine with both text articles and comics, he arranged to interview Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee in New York City, New York. Then, as Hewetson recalled in the early 2000s,
Not long after my meeting ... I received a phone call from [Marvel production manager] Sol Brodsky offering me a job as Stan's assistant for 'six months,' for a comparatively small salary. Stan had liked me, needed an assistant, and was going to 'introduce new guys into the meium who he figured had potential,' is how I think they put it.[4]
His duties included opening and answering fan mail, preparing the letters pages for most of the comics, mailing complete sets of comics to Marvel writers and artists, awarding "No Prizes", and serving as Lee's gofer. He also took the Marvel staff and freelancer photos published in Fantastic Four Annual #7 (cover-dated Nov. 1969). Lee invited him to submit story ideas, but Hewetson's writing style, heavily influenced by Edgar Allen Poe and other 19th-century authors, proved "highly unsuitable for Marvel superheroes", Hewetson said.[4] Hewetson remained at his post for "nine or ten months" and was succeeded as Lee's assistant by Allyn Brodsky, no relation to Sol Brodsky.[4] He would eventually script one horror story for Marvel, the seven-page "Master and Slave", illustrated by Syd Shores, in Creatures on the Loose #12 (July 1971); this came after he had already begun writing uncredited stories for rival DC Comics and for the satirical magazines Sick and Cracked,[1] and penning his first credited story, the 10-page "4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - Blast Off! to a Nightmare!", illustrated by Jack Sparling, in Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Vampirella #3 (Jan. 1970).[5]
That had come about, he said in 2003, when he was writing an article for Cinema magazine about comic-book characters in film:
I knew [that the Warren movie magazine] Famous Monsters of Filmland had old movie stills, so I called them up, talked to [publisher] Jim Warren, and he invited me 'round to meet him. He was very helpful providing pictures for my feature, and we appeared to get along immediately. He asked me to write stories for [his black-and-white horror-comics magazines] Creepy and Eerie, and I did — I sent him stories within about a week and he liked them and asked for more. He never rejected anything I ever wrote for him, even though I admit some of my earlier stories were pretty flimsy.[1]
Hewetson went on to write a number of stories through mid-1971 issues of Warren's Creepy and Eerie, while also breaking in at the start-up rival Skywald Publications, with "Vault of a Vampire" in Nightmare #3 (April 1971). Skywald was co-founded in 1970 by Sol Brodsky, whom Hewetson knew from Marvel Comics, and who brought freelancer Hewetson in as associate editor; Hewetson's first credit as such appears in Psycho #7 (July 1972).[5] By the following month, Brodsky had returned to Marvel, and Hewetson became Skywald's editor.[5][6]
Soon afterward, Hewetson, both out of personal preference and in an attempt to distinguish Skywald's magazines from those of industry leader Warren,[1] instituted a stylistic theme he called "Horror-Mode", going so far as to receive approval from publisher Israel Waldman to change the company name to Horror-Mode Publishing Corp. — a move nixed by the low-budget company's accountant, who noted there would be legal costs incurred in a name change, and also potentially confuse distributors.[7] As Hewetson described the genesis and specifics of the Horror-Mood in 2003, it
...wasn't patterned after any other magazines that had ever existed, but was inspired by everything that had ever ... had the word horror applied to it. I was particularly enamored of Poe and the classics, and by Lovecraft, who wasn't exactly 'unknown' at the time, but he wasn't exactly a household name either. And by then I’d come to love the old EC horror comics, which I didn’t particularly like as a kid.... So the Horror-Mood was a glass bowl containing everything I respected about horror, including loftier writers like Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Orwell.[1]
Hewetson estimates he wrote over 500 published stories for Skywald,[8] using such pseudonyms as Joe Dentyn, Stuart Williams, Henry Bergman, Hugh Laskey, Harvey Lazarus and Howie Anderson,[1] as well as Peter Cappiello, Edward Farthing, and Victor Buckley.[9] He also created a public persona, "Archaic Al Hewetson", that would often appear as a mascot, introducing stories.[10] Hewetson's ongoing "Shoggoth Crusade" feature, which launched with "This Grotesque Green Earth" in Nightmare #15 (Oct. 1973), envisioned himself and other Skywald staffers hunting subterranean supernatural creatures.[11] Hewetson also wrote the ongoing feature "The Human Gargoyles", which he called "a Kafkaesque parody of religion, horror, society, family life and pop culture" as seen through the experiences of a family of three gargoyles (technically, grotesques) come to life.[9]
Toward the end of Skywald's existence — which Hewetson was tasked to official announce in a March 25, 1975 memo to staffers and others — became involved with a movie company in Toronto, Canada.[12] It is unclear whether this was Quadrant Films, for which Hewetson, post-Skywald, wrote several paid-for but unproduced screenplays. He recalled in 2003,
I wrote a horror movie for [Quadrant] called Gaunt [about] a 350-year-old sorcerer hell-bound to have his own way about everything. And then I wrote a screenplay called Conspiracy, a Presidential murder mystery; and then Murderstone, a thriller about the diamond business. And then Savage Midsummer's Night, a thriller about illegal dog fights in a rural Canadian community. Then Lunatics, about a dysfunctional family whose many members were determined to kill each other. Then Ladykiller, a thriller about a hit-woman who was engaged to kill her victims in very dramatic ways.[13]
Six to eight months after Skywald ended, and concurrent with his Quadrant screenwriting, Hewetson began publishing a city magazine for St. Catharines, Ontario, and neighboring, Niagara Falls, Ontario. He successfully expanded to city magazines in Buffalo, New York, and Windsor, Ontario, the latter called Greater Windsor.[13] By 2003, he and artist Pablo Marcos, an old Skywald compatriot, were working on two graphic novels: Labyrinth Street, a horror anthology series set in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Suko: Samurai Time Warrior. With another Skywald artist, Maelo Cintron, he was planning to create a modern-day Western series, Gargoyle Justice, starring the grownup "Human Gargoyles" child, Andrew Sartyros, as a U.S. Marshal.[13] Following the 1982 death of Canadian artist and Skywald contributor Gene Day, rumors circulated for years that Hewetson was dead, which Hewetson attributed to "the word spread[ing] that 'the young Canadian who used to do Skywald is dead.'"[12]
Hewetson survived a heart attack and stroke in 2001,[12] then died unexpectedly on January 6, 2004, shortly after finishing work on the book The Complete Illustrated History of the Skywald Horror-Mood (Critical Vision, 2004). As of at least the early 1990s, he was married to Michelle Lemieux.[14]