Al Hewetson

Alan Hewetson – January 6, 2004) 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.

Biography

Early life and career Al Hewetson was born and initially raised in Glasgow, Scotland, There he read such comic books as Classics Illustrated, The Beano and Eagle At his new home, 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).

He became a darkroom technician In 1966 and 1967, he worked for Expo 67, and in the middle of 1967 founded an advertising and photographic studio in Ottawa and began doing promotion for rock groups. That ended the following year. and would later be photo editor for at least one of Diefenbaker's three 1975-1977 memoirs.

Comics 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 a 1973 interview, he phoned Lee, "with whom I’d corresponded for about a year, and asked him for a position and within a few weeks I had the position. That’s how I got into writing professionally."

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 Allan Poe and other 19th-century authors, proved "highly unsuitable for Marvel superheroes", Hewetson said.

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. managing editorial from his home in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. As he described the process,

I write my stories, and edit others' stories, and send them directly to the various artists. The art is sent to New York, when finished, where I collate it. I produce all the editorial production here at home, and when I visit New York I package the entire magazine and do the production for it. And then, in an incredible fat bundle, I mail the thing off to our printers who have nothing to do but perhaps add the occasional, miscellaneous screen and make the negatives for the magazine. Blueprint proofs of those negatives are sent to me which I proof editorially and I make certain changes and approve the package. And the magazine is then printed in Canada and then shipped to Connecticut and from there to various distribution centers, including back to Canada. 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. using such pseudonyms as Joe Dentyn, Stuart Williams, Henry Bergman, Hugh Laskey, Harvey Lazarus and Howie Anderson, 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. 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.

Later career and death Toward the end of Skywald's existence — which Hewetson was tasked to officially announce in a March 25, 1975, memo to staffers and others — Hewetson became involved with a movie company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is unclear whether this was Quadrant Films, for which Hewetson, post-Skywald, wrote several paid-for but unproduced screenplays. He recalled in 2003,

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. The couple had a daughter, Wendy. Hewetson and Williams divorced in 1991 in Windsor, Ontario. From the early 1990s until the time of his death, Al Hewetson was in a common law relationship with Michelle Lemieux in Windsor.

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.'"

In 2019, Al Hewetson was inducted into The Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Hall of Fame for outstanding achievement in the creation of comic books.