Amazing Man
1920 - Will Everett is born on his family farm in Decatur, Mississippi.
1932 - 12-year-old Will becomes the first student from a segregated school to compete in track on the state level in Mississippi. He earns the nickname "Amazing'.
1936 - 16-year-old Will competes in the Olympics in Berlin, winning silver behind Jesse Owens.
1938 - 18-year-old Will attends a historically black college on a track scholarship, majoring in business administration. He plays football and becomes class president.
1939 - WW2 begins.
1941 - 21-year-old Will graduates early to enlist and serve in the European theater.
1942 - 22-year-old Will is among the soldiers captured by Gerald Shugel. He sacrifices himself to save Hippolyta & Steve Trevor, absorbing the radiation of an experimental reactor in Shugel's laboratories. He is in hospital for three months, learning to use his newfound adaptive powers. He is invited to join the Justice Society as Amazing Man. He has a brief affair with Sandra Knight when the Society works with the Freedom Fighters.
1945 - 25-year-old WIll returns to Mississippi as WW2 ends, building his own business and serving underprivileged communities as Amazing Man.
1949 - 29-year-old Will's powers begin to wane. He chooses to retire as Amazing Man.
1951 - 31-year-old Will marries his wife Myrtle.
1952 - 32-year-old Will becomes the president of the Regional Counsil of Negro Leadership, organizing actions for civil rights.
1954 - 34-year-old Will, spurred by the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs Board of Ed, becomes a field secretary of the NAACP, organizing boycotts across Mississippi, becoming a prominent figure in the civil rights movement.
1963 - 43-year-old Will is shot & killed by white supremacists trying to stop his integration efforts. His wife Myrtle becomes a leading voice of the movement, speaking on his behalf at the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom.
Let me just start with this, so it's not buried somewhere below: the timeline we've built here is based almost entirely on the life of real-world civil rights hero Medgar Evers, With a quick nod to olympian Mack Robinson. Amazing Man is an interesting footnote in the history of DC, but by far the most interesting thing about him is the idea that his heroism extended into these real-world areas. We strongly encourage everyone to go learn more about not just Evers but all of the men and women who contributed to the civil rights movement in America, because sometimes real life has Superheroes too.
Amazing Man's Comic HistoryWhile Amazing Man canonically existed during the Golden Age, he actually never appeared in comics published in that era. He was invented in 1983 by Roy Thomas & Jerry Ordway in the pages of All-Star Squadron, a comic that depicted the adventures of the Earth-2 heroes during the Golden Age. The goal was to get some representation on a team that was pretty notoriously white, but it didn't happen in a vacuum; he was based on a public domain character of the same name, by comic creator Bill Everett.
Our Amazing Man's story begins in flashback in Issue #23, where we learn about Will growing up on a sharecropper farm, his training for the Olympics and participating in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, and then his struggle to find work upon his return until he found work cleaning the lab of scientist Terry Curtis, which led to him being used as a test subject by the Ultra-Humanite, and working for her briefly before he changes sides and becomes a member of the All-Star Squadron. |
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Will continued to make fairly regular appearances for the rest of the series, but the book had a ridiculously huge cast and tended to have a lot going on. He would also appear in books spinning out of All-Star Squadron like Infinity Inc and the Post Crisis Young All-Stars, but once the Crisis happened, his story was essentially placed in the past and considered complete.
The next Amazing Man was actually the grandson of the Original, Will Everett III. He is introduced in the pages of Justice League America, and would bounce between teams like Justice League Europe and the Justice League Task Force before becoming a main character in the 90's team Extreme Justice where he was romanced by Maxima, and remained a main team member for the duration of the series. We are later introduced to another grandson of Will Sr, Marcus Clay, in the pages of Geoff John's Justice Society of America. This character is pretty much exclusively appears in this series alone, but what is very much of interest to us is that in his introduction, Johns expands hugely on the story of the original character, Introducing the idea that in the 60's he was one of the most prominent figures of the civil rights movement, organizing marches and quelling riots. He's said to have hunted down and captured James Earl Ray after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. |
Our Amazing Man StoryWe're actually making Will Everett's time as a superhero pretty brief, considering that in canon it seems to have continued for several generations. Our real intention here is to include a hero of a different sort; his time as a superhero is really just here to tie him into the history of the Justice Society. Because of the structure of our timeline, all the heroes of this era need to have died sometime before the mid-to-late sixties, but tragically it's really not hard to find civil rights heroes that were killed before their time.
We chose Megar Evers specifically because he was killed in the early 60s. We made him about five years older, because it's cannon that Will Everett competed in the 1936 Olympics, and we wanted to include that... which essentially means we're also including elements of the story of Mack Robinson, the African American Olympian who took Silver behind Jesse Owens in the 400m. |
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In cannon, Everett was simply working in a lab when he was found by the Ultra-Humanite's men, but in real life, Megar Evers was a decorated soldier from WWII, and since we already know that in our timeline the Humanite was experimenting on soldiers, it makes way more sense to make these events happen in wartime Europe. We also included Hippolyta and Steve Trevor in this story, because it gives him a link to the JSA once he recovers and learns to use his powers.
Once the war is over, we're making very few changes to the life of Megar Evers. He was a younger man, so he actually attended college AFTER the war, but otherwise, we just followed the events of his life. Evers, along with countless other men and women, was a key part of the desegregation of schools in Mississippi. He worked in an area with a large White Supremacist population and lived under constant threat of violence, and was ultimately killed at only thirty-seven years old. His work helped resolve massive injustice in his home state. He's a vital part of the fabric of American history, and if the man DID ever have superpowers that he used to punch nazis during WWII, that would have been the second most interesting thing about him. So, that's our Amazing Man, Will Everett. A man that briefly served alongside the JSA in wartime, but whose contributions to his country go far beyond superheroics. |
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