NOTES - MAY 2026

Panel Fun:

Don't know how I could've skipped this the first time I read through these comics, but here we are: Amazing-Man suplexing an angry bull. (Amazing-Man Comics 012, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 001

Some minor super-heroes I only have a small amount to say about:

the Wraith:

The Wraith is a very similar concept to the Spectre: a murdered cop comes back to mete out justice. They even have the same white/ green colour scheme, only reversed. A few things about the Wraith that sets him apart: though he does have some general ghost powers his main trick is possession, he is limited to the hours between midnight and dawn, and he has weird gross arms. A major difference between him and the Spectre is that whereas the latter broke up with his fiance the minute he became a dead guy, the Wraith is all about the romantic possibilities of being a ghost, as seen in the second panel above where he seems to be erotically passing through a nude woman. (Mystery Men Comics 027-031, 1941-1942)

Dr Hypno: 

Dr Hypno, "psychologist, chemist, hypnotist and criminologist" develops a technique for temporarily placing his mind into an animal and lucky for him there's always one handy when he sees a crime go.(Amazing-Man Comics 014-021, 1940-1941)

Dash Dartwell, the Human Meteor:

Like a surprising number of other Golden Age speedsters Dash Dartwell (who incidentally has the most on-the-nose name I have seen in a long time) gets his powers from his teacher, in this case one Dr Moss. Dartwell remains a student at "Dravrah University" so his adventures hew closer to those of a college sportsman with lots of unscrupulous gamblers attempting to influence the results of sporting events between Dravrah and their rival Elay. Also, Dartwell's powers wear off pretty quickly so he's constantly popping Metabo-Accelerater pills while he messes up college track statistics for everyone. (Amazing-Man Comics 021, 1941)

Tommy the Amazing Kid:

Amazing-Man already had a cool sidekick named Zona Henderson but I guess Robin or some other kid sidekick was a bit too popular because she was replaced with her younger brother Tommy, who was hiding under a couch when Aman got a power boost and was left with enhanced strength and the ability to fly. He's a little wiener who says things like "jumpin' jellybeans!" all the time. It's a real downgrade. (Amazing-Man Comics 023-026, 1941-1942)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 472: THE GREAT QUESTION

(Amazing-Man Comics 005, 1939)

The Great Question is a member of the Council of Seven, the mysterious body of scientists and mystics who trained and orphan boy into John Aman aka the Amazing-Man. The inner dynamics of the Council of Seven can be a bit hard to parse but early on it seems like the Great Question is if not in charge at least an unofficial leader. Later, as he has more and more conflict with Amazing-Man that role is filled by Aman's mentor Nika.

From issue 5 to 11, the first year of Aman's adventures, the dynamic is such: Amazing-Man travels around helping people and inadvertently foiling the Great Question's various schemes while the Question attempts to bend Aman to his will - above is a picture of the one time he managed to actually do it, turning Amazing-Man into some sort of terrifying crime genie.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 012, Aman answers a summons to return to the Council and is rewarded with a harness that both makes his "green mist" power permanent and renders him immune to the Question's mental control. Suddenly, everything changes - sure, Amazing-Man is still travelling around foiling the Great Question's various schemes, but without the mind control aspect to their dynamic it becomes a much more satisfying hero/villain pairing.

(This seems like a good place for an aside: it's never explicitly stated but implicitly it seems like the Council of Seven must know that their most prominent member is a super-villain. Did they recruit him because he was one or was it incidental to the other things he brought to the role? Impossible to say. The gift of the anti-mind control harness makes it clear that they preferred Aman in a heroic role but that's about all that can be determined)

From this point the Great Question really comes into his own as an international super-villain. No matter where Amazing-Man goes, the Question has a group of generic goons working on a scheme of some sort. This all comes to a head in Amazing-Man Comics 021, in which Amazing-Man and the Great Question face off on an island base crawling with uniformed henchmen armed with forcefield projectors to bottle up Aman's gas form.

There's even an extremely radical giant robot!

Things really come crashing down in the next issue, as the Great Question not only joins up with the Nazis but rebrands himself as Mister Que, a much worse name. Now obviously there are a lot of classic Nazi villains - they're very easy to cast in the role because they suck - and it's clear that the Great Question Mister Que is using them to further his own goals, but it really does diminish the fun of a classic megalomaniac to see him working to further the goals of the Nazis rather than his own.

There are some interesting developments during the Mister Que era: he demonstrates more super-powers, for one, including a sort of whirlwind form used for rapid escape. He also manages to rob Fort Knox (well, Fort Fox), a classic villain cheevo. And even though I don't particularly like the Nazi uniform look he does have the right smirk to be wearing that mask.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 024, Amazing-Man and Tommy the Amazing Kid face off against the Vulture, a Nazi agent with convoluted plan to destroy NYC using US soldiers under the thrall of psychoactive temporary tattoos. In the antepenultimate panel, the Vulture pulls off a rubberoid mask to reveal that he was in fact Mister Que! His reasoning for doing this (to keep Amazing-Man from attempting to kill him) is a bit suspect, but he does manage to get away in the end. Ignominious!

And that's it for the Great Question/ Mister Que/ the Vulture. Odds are that he would have returned to vex Amazing-Man yet again but Centaur stopped publishing comics in early 1942. Both he and Amazing-Man have been brought back a handful of times over the years, of course, but mostly the Great Question languishes, unanswered.

NOTES - FEBRUARY 2024

Good reactions by the people in this crowd to Amazing-Man passing through in his Green Mist form - people usually treat it as if he's invisible but this is much more satisfying. (Amazing-Man Comics 014, 1940) 

Origins:

The Shark is not just the son of Father Neptune, he's part of a long line of father/ son Neptunes and Sharks! I was right in my belief that the Shark was more interesting than most ocean dwelling super-heroes! (Amazing-Man Comics 014, 1940)

I Don't Get It Dept:

The names on this poster are either character in the story (Dr Hypno, Lana the lion tamer) or jokes (Governor Graft, Senator Filchit, Mayor M.I. Blue), but Ivan Coe is not the former and I can't figure out any way he's the latter. It's a puzzle! (Amazing-Man Comics 019, 1941)

Attacking Hitler:

Amazing-Man participates in the grand old tradition of political commentary in comics (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

Fate of Atlantis:

Adventurer Reef Kinkaid encounters a fairly standard version of Atlantis (or Atlantia) stuck in a little bubble under an island and still somehow managing to thrive for 9000+ years. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

Gruesome:

Real gruesome death perpetrated by one-off hero the Marksman (Amazing-Man Comics 023, 1941)

Famous Names:

Hobo Harper encounters this evil guy who loves "fancy murders" and is trying to gain control of a travelling carnival - Tony Blair (Amazing-Man Comics 025, 1941)

Giant guy on the right lives in the Tennessee woods eating wild boar and ends up falling off a mountain while tussling with DA Tom Kerry. Jim Davis is the name. (Big Shot Comics 002, 1940)

Cops Shoot:

Captain Courageous is accused of being a spy (literally by one guy yelling "he's a spy!") and these cops attempt to execute him. Twice! (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

Now, the Blue Beetle did just rob a restaurant in order to get in good with a gang, but that's still not a good reason for this cop to attempt to murder him. (Big 3 006, 1941)

Canada:

Always have to note when a comic makes a stop in a specific rather than generic location in Canada, even when it's not actually Canadian for another eight years or so. This time it's Captain Courageous showing up to help these wacky pacifist fishermen drive off a Nazi invasion. (Banner Comics 004, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-HERO 006 AMAZING-MAN

(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)