[7] 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).
[8] 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.
"[4] Decades later, Hewetson detailed that not long after conducting the interview with Lee, "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.
[5]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).
[12] By the following month, Brodsky had returned to Marvel, and Hewetson became Skywald's editor,[12][13] managing editorial from his home in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.
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.
[4]Soon afterward, Hewetson, both out of personal preference and in an attempt to distinguish Skywald's magazines from those of industry leader Warren,[5] instituted a stylistic theme he called "Horror-Mood", going so far as to receive approval from publisher Israel Waldman to change the company name to Horror-Mood Publishing Corp. — a move nixed by the low-budget company's accountant, who noted there would be legal costs incurred in a name change, which would also potentially confuse distributors.
[14] 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.
[5]Hewetson estimates he wrote over 500 published stories for Skywald,[15] using such pseudonyms as Joe Dentyn, Stuart Williams, Henry Bergman, Hugh Laskey, Harvey Lazarus and Howie Anderson,[5] as well as Peter Cappiello, Edward Farthing, and Victor Buckley.
[17] 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.
[20] By 2003, he and artist Pablo Marcos, a Skywald compatriot, were working on two graphic novels: Labyrinth Street, a horror anthology series set in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Suko: Samurai Time Warrior.
[23] From the early 1990s until the time of his death, Al Hewetson was in a common law relationship with Michelle Lemieux in Windsor.
'"[19] Hewetson survived a heart attack and stroke in 2001,[19] then died unexpectedly on January 6, 2004,[5][25] shortly after finishing work on the book Skywald!