Alter Ego #71 August 2007 (magazine review).

Despite having Captain Canuck, Vindicator and Wolverine on the cover of this 2007 edition of Alter Ego, the cover design is a reinvention of a Kirby picture for What If…?. The characters below them are from the compilation book The Great Canadian Comic Books by Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert from 1971. Editor Roy Thomas got permission to reprint sections of it here.

With World War Two and paper shortages, American comic books were no longer exported to Canada. As there was a market for superheroes, a couple of publishers evolved to fill the gap. It wasn’t for long because, after the war, American comic books returned and the Canadian publishers vanished. Toronto publisher Cyril Vaughn Bell bought an offset printing press but had no experience of how to use it or get the right registration to print colour correctly. Looking at what is said here, it’s amazing he sold anything. He did encourage a few new Canadian artists but, when the opportunity came to move stateside after the war, they didn’t hang around because the rates were better. All this comes from writer Alan Walker’s introduction.

With the main section, Hirst and Loubert’s text covers a lot of ground, although much of it focuses on the art itself. A lot of it, especially the horses, concentrates on the action. Although not said, I do get the impression it wasn’t enlarged too much from the printed page, which would explain some of the close-ups. Artist Ed Alton went on to work for EC Comics and Mad magazine. There was even a superhero called the Penguin, not only because of his evening suit but also because of the mask with the extended beak. He’s on the right side of the cover above. You do wonder how he didn’t clip anyone standing too close to him. The best wry smile comes from a detective named Hugh Dunnit.

If you thought publishers concealed creators’ names in case they demanded more money, identifying, let alone interviewing, comic book writers from the 1950s is even more difficult. However, Jim Amash’s interview with Al Schutzer is quite an eye-opener. Schutzer clearly saw it as a business and lost count of the number of stories he wrote, but regarded it as a stepping stone into articles and, finally, novel-writing. I could almost see Amash’s eyebrows rise when Schutzer said who his classmates at school were, including Bill Gaines. Although Schutzer later approached him for work at EC Comics, he was rejected because they knew each other from school.

Writer Michael Finn had an unusual subject for comic book artists whose artwork he bought. He picked a cover from The Avengers or The Invaders and got different artists to speculate on what might have happened a minute later, with some interesting results.

Have I said enough to entice you to keep a look out for early Alter Ego magazines?

GF Willmetts

July 2026

(pub: TwoMorrows Publishing. 82-page illustrated magazine. Price: varies. ISSN: 1932-6890. Direct from them, you can get it digitally for $4.99 (US))

check out websites: www.TwoMorrows.com and https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_55&products_id=579