Black Superheroes: Amazing-Man (I, II, & III)

1940s heroes who is drawn suspiciously like a 1980s hero

Name(s): Will Everett, Will Everett III, Markus Clay 

First Appearance(s): All-Star Squadron #23 (1983), Justice League America #86 (1994), Justice Society of America Vol. 3 #12 (2008)

History: Will Everett was a medal winning athlete who competed in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but despite that, due to the racism of the time, he fell into obscurity shortly after and the only work he could get was as a janitor for a laboratory belonging to Doctor Terry Curtis. During an incident involving the Ultra-Huminite kidnapping Curtis, Everett as caught in a explosion that granted him super powers. He gained the ability to transform his body into a replica of matter that he touched. Initially he was forced to serve the Ultra-Huminite as the henchman “Amazing-Man”, alongside Curtis (who also developed powers and was forced to operate as “Cyclotron”), but he soon rebelled and instead joined the All-Star Squadron and became one of the most prominent heroes of the era.

Will’s career took a turn when J. Edgar Hoover (stinking sucker) revealed his identity to the public, putting him and his family in danger. Following this, Everett turned his focus to the Civil Rights movement, where he ended up becoming an important figure comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. Somehow. As the years went by, he started a family, but when his son died, he took his grandson, Will Everett III, into his care. Eventually Will Sr. would die of cancer, and it was ambiguous if it was a direct result of his powers, but Will III was traumatized by it, nonetheless.

In college, Will III developed powers similar to his grandfather but he thought of them as a curse as he desperately wanted to live a normal life. In time, however, he resigned himself to taking up the Amazing-Man mantle, despite believing it would be the eventual death of him. He would join the Justice League when asked by Wonder Woman and served in various incarnations of the team until he proved himself right and died in action, killed by a supervillain named Mist.

Sometime after this, Marcus Clay, Will III’s cousin and Will Sr.’s other grandson, developed similar powers as well and began operating as Amazing-Man in post-Katrina New Orleans, where he differed from his immediate predecessor by not only acting as a superhero but also a community activist, as he believed that aspect of their grandfather’s legacy was the more important one. He was recruited to join the recently revamped Justice Society of America, a team that included several of his grandfather’s contemporaries as well as legacy heroes like himself.

Pictured: The most recent Amazing-Man
Well, the most recent that doesn't completely suck

Beta Says: Geez, I feel like I’ve been sitting on this one for many years, partially because I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Do I focus on the first Amazing-Man? Do I give each one their own profile? Ultimately, because all three of them have  pretty short histories, it would be okay to do all three at once. The main thing about the first Amazing- Man though is his similarity to other modern characters, in that he, despite his bio, is NOT a creation of the Golden Age of Comics but a character created in the 80s, retroactively having been active during the 1940s. In this way he is extremely similar to Sentry, the Blue Marvel, and one of the Captains America. But Will predated all of them by several decades.

More on the amazing history of the Everett family after the jump.

Okay, these creators weren't messing around!

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, it should probably be mentioned that Will Everett was named after, and was a tribute to, legendary comic writer Bill Everett as well his 1939 creation the Amazing-Man. Now despite having the same name, our boy Will has nothing to do with the actual Golden Age character other than sharing a name, but “fun trivia”; the original Amazing-Man appears to currently be owned or licensed or otherwise used by Marvel Comics,  after buying Malibu Comics in the 1990s  who had been using him. But again, that guy has nothing to do with these Amazing-Men and is also not black, so let’s move on.

Back to Will Sr.; as already said, he was NOT a creation of the Golden Age of Comics; they weren’t making black superheroes quite yet. Will is an example of retroactive continuity, and is a character who despite being created in the 80s, he is said from a lore perspective to have been in the DC Universe all along, likely in an effort to add a bit of diversity to the comic books’ history (because the idea that no black person became a superhero in the 1940s or 1950s is a bit laughable). This isn’t all that outlandish, as comic book companies, especially DC Comics, have been retconing their own continuity basically ever since they decided that there should be continuity between their various titles. Frankly, the creation of Amazing-Man is a minor change, which is fine because Amazing-Man himself is a very minor character.

To be fair, no more minor than, like, half of these guys

But the idea of a new character being a part of the comics’ continuity since the beginning is a plot point that Marvel used to great fanfare multiple times in the ensuing decades. First, there was the Sentry, which was a little different because the entire point of his original comic was a meta version of this, as it was a hoax designed to trick readers into thinking a Stan Lee creation that predated the Fantastic Four (Stan himself was in on it). Five years after that though, another, blacker, Superman-like hero was introduced in the Blue Marvel. Despite being created in 2005, according to his comic he was America’s greatest hero in the 1960s, making him in lore predate the vast majority of Marvel’s superheroes by decades.

Also, the Blue Marvel’s career was also stop short by racism in the US Government, but with a many retcons in Amazing-Man’s history, it’s hard for me to know when exactly the  J. Edgar Hoover plot actually happened. Anyway, do I think that the Blue Marvel might be a secret rip-off of Amazing-Man? Meh, maybe not. Blue Marvel’s creator, writer/actor Kevin Grevioux, says he’d envisioned the character since he was a child so who knows? Even if it was Marvel barrowing from DC, I have to say that the Blue Marvel, despite not being an A-List character, feels significantly more important than any of the Amazing-Men, who all were relatively minor players in DC for most of the existence. 

We need a new term for this trope...

There are also similarities between Will Sr. and Isaiah Bradley, the character retroactively crated to be the original black Captain America. Not only is his creation in real life similar to Will’s, but also like Will his descendants would also honor his legacy by becoming heroes, as his genetic son Josiah X and his grandson Patriot (though, to be fair, Isiah's story is significantly more horrific than just getting pants by J. Edgar Hoover). Again, was Amazing-Man’s influence involved in the creation of the Truth: Red, White, & Black miniseries? Maybe, maybe not, but if it is a coincidence, it would mean that DC had a cool idea first, didn’t do all that much with it, then Marvel came along years later and improved on it by a high degree. (Quick aside: it’s odd to me that Josiah X seems to show up in more Black History material that Sunspot)

Anyway, let’s focus on the Everett family. Will, Sr. was featured in the All-Star Squadron in the 80s as well as appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths shortly after. Beyond that he didn’t really have much of an impact in post-Crisis DC stories until his grandson emerged in the Justice League books (and as part of Will III’s backstory he was already dead). Will III, for his part, came about during a fairly forgotten period of the JLA’s history, as the team a bit after this was rebooted by Grant Morrison as the epic “JLA” with the founders/big DC names a few years later and that overshadowed a lot of earlier 90s version of the team. In fact, he only lasted around four years before he died, not really making any big impact during his short existence.

Not a lot pics of Will III on the net

Then there was Will Sr.’s other grandson Markus Clay. Now, Markus is interesting because unlike his predecessor, he was created after Isaiah Bradley and the Blue Marvel and thus the creators would have been well aware of those characters' impact (especially Bradley who had a shit ton of promotion and attention at the time). I suspect that is why they took a more politicly active route with him, as the conversation about black the history of black heroes in the comic industry was really taking off during the 2000s. Of course, his design kind of looks like what a room full of white dudes would come up with while trying to make a politically relevant black activist superhero in the 2000s, and it’s a bit embarrassing (but his name isn’t “Markus X”, so they have the high ground over Marvel). Of course, like his cousin Will III, Markus wouldn’t be around all that long, as despite joining the awesome version of the Justice Society from this time period, and it being really thematically appropriate for him to do so, he only was around for one story arc before leaving the team (and honestly, the team was getting so bloated by then that the writers shouldn’t have bothered creating him in the first place) and as far as I’m aware he hasn’t been seen since, and that was 15 years ago. The biggest throughline of the Amazing-Men seems to be that creators can’t stay interested in them for more than a few years.

There was one more Amazing-Man at DC that I should mention; Rocker Bonn, who appeared in the New 52 OMAC title. In it he doesn’t appear to be black or related to the Everett family, and also a villain maybe? But clearly, he was created with them in mind because he had identical powers as them.  The fact that he exists at all feels like a slap in the face to their legacy, and I was not shocked to see Dan DiDio being listed as one of his creators. If you were to tell me that DiDio made a shortsighted decision about an old character without thinking twice about any of the racial implications then I would not be surprised in the least.

I wonder if the creators wanted to rename Marcus "Africa-Man" 

Ignoring Rocker Bonn (hopefully forever), we should now ask the question as to whether Amazing-Man can work in modern times? Will. Sr. actually appeared in DC Power: A Celebration, an anthology book DC put out in 2024 for Black History month. So clearly Amazing-Man has not been forgotten. That said, I don’t even know if Markus Clay still exists, as DC has had at least three company continuity reboot events since his last appearance. If he does, then it’s an easy lay-up to add him to a modern superhero team. He has connections with the JSA and legacy value to the JLA through is cousin, so why not him rather than creating new Green Lanterns to be the black representation? I don’t think he could support his own book, even a miniseries, but perhaps an interesting title could be a book following the Amazing-Man legacy. Something that could feature stories on all three characters throughout history. 

Regardless, striking now with such a recent appearance to his name would do wonders to bring Amazing-Man into the forefront, were DC interested in such a thing.

Amazing-Man knows this is the only way to deal with Nazis/fascists

I’ve written waaay more than I planned to about these relatively minor characters, so I’ll force myself to call it a day here. For more about the Amazing-Men, check out World of Black Heroes (here, here, and here). Next time, in our final profile of 2025, we will look at a character that some people might want to argue is a recent example of Minority Replacement…but those people would probably be quite racist.