(Amazing-Man Comics 005-026, 1939-1942, plus various other Centaur books)
Amazing-Man is not particularly obscure: he was supposedly the inspiration for both Iron Fist and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt and eventually ended up dropped whole cloth into both one of the Malibu universes and the Marvel Universe (which, yes, means he's technically in the Marvel Universe twice but if Malibu comics ever comes back in any substantial way I will make and consume an edible hat).
The thing I always focused on in descriptions of Amazing-Man's origin were the tests he took to prove that his training was complete. Test 1, put on by underutilized character the Strongest Man in Tibet: hold back an elephant.
Test 2 is set by the Great Question, a member of the Amazing-Man Training Committee who also happens to be a super-villain, surprising few: fight a cobra without the use of your limbs. This is the one that made the cover, and with good reason - he really chomps that snake good!
It's unclear whether Lady Zina is on the selection committee or if they just have a knife-thrower on retainer, but "has a knife thrown through his neck" is definitely the thing about Amazing-Man that stuck with me from my many readings of Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Superheroes back in the day. That it's actually a test of his resistance to pain diminishes the weirdness of it only a little.
Test 4 is just languages and trivia, bit of an anticlimax.
BUT! Amazing-Man is a genuinely fun comic and I found myself actually reading the text story starring him in the first issue, AND GLAD I AM THAT I DID - it details the test of his musical abilities, and how the final part of the test was to sing a powerful song perfectly. How was that perfection measured? A man strapped to some sort of music-powered death chair nearby died. It is possible that more than one super-villain was on Amazing-Man's training committee.
I have not yet read all of Amazing-Man Comics so there may be more tests to be revealed - watch this space!
UPDATE: No further trials from his initial time before the Council of Seven have surfaced but check out this, from a secondary trial about a year later:
Purification by fire: a classic (Amazing-Man 011, 1940)
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