Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alter Ego, kickstarter, Nate Cosby

7 Page Excerpt From Nate Cosby & Jacob Edgar's Alter Ego Graphic Novel

Published Mon, 14 Mar 2022 12:29:08 -0500

Nate Cosby and Jacob Edgar are launching a brand new graphic novel, Alter Ego, on Kickstarter. Described as an action-packed superhero epic set during the golden age of Hollywood, about someone who has two superheroic identities. Basically, what if Batman and Superman were the same person? The 100-page graphic novel is coloured by Kike J. Diaz and lettered by Rus Wooton with additional covers by Wilfredo Torres, Phil Hester, Declan Shalvey, Chris Eliopoulos, and Sozomaika. And Bleeding Cool has seven of those hundred pages to tease you with…

Hush-hush and on the QT, we present to you, dear reader, the Golden Age of Hollywood. Los Angeles is ripe with beautiful beaches and gorgeous movie stars, and there's opportunity as far as the eye can wander. There is also, unfortunately, a supervillain problem, with rogues running rampant everywhere. During the day, the city is attacked by atomic robots, robbers that run football formations, and circus acts with a death wish! And by night? There's an onslaught of gangsters with magic wands, feral beasts out for blood, and seedy criminal organizations conducting cosmic-powered turf wars.

In ALTER EGO, 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.

"When our story begins, Ace Adams has been successfully fighting crime by day as Whiz-Bang for a year," says Nate Cosby. "Whiz-Bang and his can-do attitude are beloved by everybody. He's on posters and lunch boxes. He stars in comic books, and even has his own breakfast cereal! But when Ace chooses to also defend the night as The Black Dog, the balance begins to shift and what was once a blast for Ace becomes a deadly tightrope act. He'll be faced with impossible choices, forced to compromise his moral code, and begin to question the entire purpose of his quest to always be there and save everyone."

"In a lot of ways, ALTER EGO is exactly the kind of project I got into comics for," says Jacob Edgar. "I'm an unabashed superhero fan, particularly superheroes flavored with the kind of swashbuckling adventure tone that we're going for. I love bringing this elevated, fantasy version 40s/50s Hollywood to life and I think readers will be really excited by the characters and world Nate and I are creating. We're jumping from bombastic superheroics, to noir, to Old West movie sets and so much more. I think there's an energy we're putting into the book that I hope will leap off the page when people get ahold of it."

"ALTER EGO is all about what it means to be a hero," says Cosby. "Can you do more good if you're a role model to kids and the community? Or is justice best dished out by a mysterious vigilante operating in the shadows? And when one man tries to be three people…who is he, really? ALTER EGO is about what happens when you realize you can't do everything. You can't save everyone. But you can try. It's the kind of story I'm passionate about and why I started Linney Incorporated."