Because I'm a big believer in the humans that create heroes being just as important as the heroes themselves, I will now take a moment to introduce you, briefly, to Roy Thomas.
Roy William Thomas, Jr. (born November 22, 1940) is an American comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is possibly best known for introducing the pulp magazinehero Conan the Barbarian to American comics, with a series that added to the storyline of Robert E. Howard's character and helped launch a sword and sorcery trend in comics. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes – particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America – and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and Avengers, and DC Comics' All-Star Squadron, among other titles.
Thomas was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011.
The things they don't mention about Roy Thomas is that he revamped the Vision in the Avengers, created Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, gave new life to sidekicks and second stringers in the Young All-Stars and , most importantly, created the first African American Superhero.
Okay, so Amazing Man is only first in a Retroactive kind of way, but there he was in the 1940's, fighting side by side with the legends of the Golden Age and becoming one of their number.
Will Everett was a promising young African-AmericanOlympian who had competed in the 1936 Summer Olympicsin Berlin, but his post-Olympic career devolved into a janitorial profession at a laboratory owned by Dr. Terry Curtis. During an accident involving the explosion of some equipment to which he was exposed (developed by the criminal mastermind the Ultra-Humanite),
Everett quickly developed the ability to mimic whatever properties he touched (similar to Marvel Comics' Absorbing Man). For example, if he touched steel, then his body became composed of steel.[
All-Star Squadron
At first, he was employed by the Ultra-Humanite as a henchman along with Curtis (as Cyclotron) and Deathbolt. However, his sympathies soon swayed towards the side of good after repeated exposure to the All-Star Squadron, a team of both Golden Age characters and retroactive characters like himself, with whom he joined to defeat his former employer's machinations. He then served a lengthy stint as a member of this voluminous mystery man organization.
In February 1942, the Squadron helped Everett defeat the bigoted villain in his home town of Detroit, the Real American. During the first Crisis, Amazing-Man was one of a group of heroes chosen by the Monitor to stop the Anti-Monitor's quest for destruction. On a future case, Amazing-Man's powers changed so that now he had mastery of magnetism while losing his ability to mimic matter.
Civil Rights Activist
In the 1950s, his secret identity was revealed to the general public by J. Edgar Hoover. This act endangered the lives of Everett's wife and family. During the Civil Rights Movementof the 1960s, the murder of his nephew alongside two other civil rights activists spurred his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the time. He led marches against segregation across the United States of America, and also helped to quell riots in Detroit. Everett was also responsible for the capture of Martin Luther King's murderer James Earl Ray. In the DC Comics Universe, he is considered the third most important advocate for African American civil rights, behind acclaimed activists Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Heirs
It was later revealed that his grandson, Will Everett III (a.k.a. "Junior")
also developed mimicry abilities. Will Everett Senior was last seen in the hospital, visited by his grandson Will Everett III. The senior Everett was dying of cancer. The status of his son, the father of Amazing-Man III, is currently unknown. For a brief time, his grandson carried on the legacy of Amazing-Man before dying tragically. Later, another grandson named Markus Clay
would take up the mantle of Amazing-Man.
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