Nate Cosby takes us back to the glitz and glamor of 1950s Hollywood in Alter Ego where scandal and crime spawn two superheroes like none other. Joined by artist Jacob Edgar (James Bond), colorist Kike J. Diaz (Red Sonja), and letterer Rus Wooton, Cosby’s Alter Ego is an original graphic novel crowdfunding now on Kickstarter. Learn more about it in our interview!
LA’s scandalous crime wave inspires two strikingly different heroes to spring into action. By day, the streets are protected by Whiz-Bang, a grinning, gregarious defender of goodness. By night, the City of Angels is defended by an entirely different kind of hero: The Black Dog appears in a cloud of smoke, a mysterious vigilante determined to strike fear in cowardly criminals. And unbeknownst to the mayor, the police force, the entire city…these radically different heroes share an incredible secret: They are the same man.
Ace Adams is a cocky stuntman who can throw himself off 20-story buildings, or scrap with a legion of thugs. Ace is the kind of guy that has a motor that won’t quit. He thinks he’s got the world on a string; all he has to do is keep pulling. This superhero thing is a gas, and it allows him to perform, in ways that he’s not able to in movies, now that his acting career is stalled. Who knows…if he saves enough people, maybe they’ll make a movie about him, and maybe he’ll star in it.
I can barely manage my 9-5 job. How does Ace handle working both the day and the night shift?
Badly. See, it wasn’t always his plan. Ace was just a normal guy, that was a little stronger than the average person. He figured he could help people, so he threw on a costume and fought bad guys during the day as Whiz-Bang! But it became obvious that this wouldn’t work for the seedier nighttime crime…so he developed another, darker persona, and prowled the alleyways as The Black Dog. The problem is, when you spend all your time pretending to be two completely different people…who are you, really?
Do you see yourself or someone you know in Ace and his efforts to be and do everything for everyone?
The idea for one person as two superheroes actually came from when I first moved to New York. I was spending my days editing comics at the Marvel offices, then I’d go home and write television scripts all night. I’d sleep two hours, then it was back to editing. I was thrilled to have both jobs, but it wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle. I was doing too much. And that’s what Ace is doing…he wants to defeat every villain, thwart every crime, and he thinks the best way to do that is to never stop, never be off the clock. But he’ll soon find that trying to do too much can have horrendously destructive consequences.
Why did you choose stunt work as Ace’s occupation? What research went into understanding his role?
It started with my and Jacob Edgar’s mutual love of Singin’ In The Rain. Gene Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a guy desperate to break into Hollywood, and was willing to do ANY stunt, no matter HOW dangerous, just to get noticed. So it occurred to me, what better profession is there for a super-powered person than a stuntman? They’re hard to hurt, they’ve only gotta work on the days where stuff breaks or explodes, and they can always “call out sick” with the excuse that a building fell on them.
But more than the profession itself, we wanted to capture the vibe of Ace as a hustler, an eager guy trying to do his best at his job, and in both of his masked personas. He’s a people pleaser, he wants to save people, but he also really wants to be liked.
Why did you choose the Golden Age of Hollywood for your setting? What aspects of this era attract you to it?
It’s where most of my favorite movies come from! Casablanca, Meet Me In St. Louis, An American In Paris, Citizen Kane, Bringing Up Baby, The Maltese Falcon, The Bad And The Beautiful, His Girl Friday, The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Double Indemnity, 12 Angry Men, and on and on and on. And then there are the movies I grew up with that were set in that era, like The Rocketeer and LA Confidential.
On top of that, Alter Ego is a story about identity, about the person you are when you’re anonymously walking down the street, when you want to show off, when you’re alone. It’s about the idea of doing the “right” thing, even when no one’s watching. That all blends into this idea I have about superheroes, of trying to be a good person while also knowingly putting on a performance…and what better setting for a story about performance than the glitzy, grimy Golden Age of Hollywood?
Check out this preview below and hop over to the Kickstarter to learn more.
