Hitting the Wall III: Amazing Man

Some characters lose their purpose when writers forget the original themes to which those characters play. For instance, with a number of Black superheroes, the original concept moves in the territory of the wonderful ability of human beings to rise above circumstances far beneath what they really deserve, in essence showing that the human spirit unleashed can transcend silly cultural neuroses like racism; but frequently writer exhaustion and the temptation of resorting to cliche redirects these characters into mere vicarious guilt objects for cultural villains to persecute. "I can rise above a racist world" becomes muted by "see how horribly they treat me," and an active character becomes a reactive character or a mere target.

Thus, once the decadent phase of his story career begins, the Black superhero can no longer afford to rise above his times. The writer has come to need him to show his anger at man's mistreatment of man; and if the character transcends this mistreatment, he no longer serves as an object example. At this stage we see fewer and fewer heroic deeds and more and more white hoods, swastikas, shaved heads, burning crosses, and whatever ludicrous paraphernalia the artists and writers choose to parade as mnemonic devices to remind the reader about the moral diseases for which they serve as symbols.

The Character's Roots

Amazing Man owed his names - both of them, both the superheroic and that of his normal identity - to a Golden Age concept created by Bill Everett, the talent who worked on Sub-Mariner pieces in the forties and again in the sixties. He created, at one point, a hero called Amazing Man, and the All-Star Squadron figure that bore this name in some ways intended to evoke the memory of both Everett and his creation.

As he first appeared, the Amazing Man of All-Star Squadron began as an Olympic athlete who performed at the 1936 Olympics in Germany, the event with the apocryphal snub from Hitler, who, in the legend, refused to recognize Jesse Owens' victory. Thomas inserted a fictional young Black athlete, Will Everett, into this historical tale, then later provided him a pretext for a superheroic role, including the familiar green-and-yellow costume and powers that roughly corresponded to those of Marvel's Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man.

Created by a supervillain as a tool to use against the swarming heroes of the All-Star Squadron - a team as densely packed as the larger incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes - Amazing Man would turn against his evil masters and reorient himself to the right side of the ongoing struggle between Good and Evil. Thomas would use this theme of the reluctant villain who tries to escape the control from a villainous master, an old Stan Lee theme (consider, for instance, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) a number of times in his career, including his introduction of the Vision in the sixties and again with Amazing Man and the tragic Cyclotron in All-Star Squadron.

The Dead-End

Had DC not essentially euthanized the creations and concepts they hired Roy Thomas to produce in All-Star Squadron, he might have faced a problem with the character Amazing Man. Unrevised, pre-Crisis continuity, after all, did not include an Amazing Man in treatments of the heroes of Earth-2, the onetime home of DC's Golden Age superheroes. One could easily envision some future story called "Whatever happened to...Amazing Man?" disposing of the character in under ten pages to explain away his absence from the Earth-2 tales of the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

Thomas might have intended to lay the groundwork for explaining Amazing Man's recorded non-presence in future stories by changes he made to the character, giving him some kind of magnetic powers instead of his visually more compelling property absorption abilities. But even before that point, the character had taken a wrong turn, storytelling-wise. You can see the essence of this diversion in the cover scan with Amazing Man chained to the burning cross. Amazing Man has descended from the role of heavy-hitting hero to damsel in distress.

As with many Black superheroes in mainstream comics, going back to the early ones in the sixties, the character began playing to themes of self-improvement in the context of a relentlessly hostile culture and later descended to playing the role of pawn sacrifice and professional victim. Hence we have the extremely unfortunate piece where Amazing Man appears on the cover of All-Star Squadron, chained to a burning cross while a character in a red, white, and blue costume and a white hood rants about eugenics. We must wonder, sometimes, if writers of such material secretly hoped for the opportunity to put Captain America in a white hood someday in order to demonstrate their views on the character of Americans in general.

The character, in a few short years, went from representing the themes of a rousing chorus of "We Shall Overcome" to a tiresome cover of "Tie Me to the Whippin' Post."

Post-Crisis Anomie

Thomas, with the burning cross story, essentially sacrificed the human message of Amazing Man to a political message about his view of the forties. The role of a hero derives from personal strengths of character, things like courage, determination, and mercy. However, the kind of victimhood evoked by the burning-cross image deals with group characteristics; and once Amazing Man became an exemplar of group attributes, one noted his heroic aspect becoming obscure. At that point, he became something to rescue instead of the determined rescuer he had proven himself already.

Such problems, however, went away with the passing of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Amazing Man's context disappeared - or, rather, writers chose to remove him from it - and, as such, his themes dissipated. He reappeared in the context of Extreme Justice, one of DC's attempts to leap onto the Image house style bandwagon of the nineties, but that environment did not particularly invest the character with meaning. He had powers and a costume but no meaningful backstory and, therefore, no particular point.

A single loss of meaning can ruin a character without a solid concept and a base of support from writers and fans. Two, such as Amazing Man suffered - once in his redefinition in All-Star Squadron and once again with the retiring of Earth-2 - frequently suffice to make a character effectively unusable. This seems to represent Amazing Man's fate - for, though he enjoyed robust beginnings, one could look forever through DC's present product line and not find any particular hint that he had ever belonged in any of their titles.