In 1973, Everett passed away at the age of 55, without getting to see his character make a comeback in 1990 in the pages of Malibu Comics and in 2008 as the Prince of Orphans in a comic book called ‘The Immortal Iron Fist,’ published by Marvel. From issue #5 to #42, he was the star character of the publisher, but in February 1942, the company went bankrupt and left him lost in the (green) mist of history.īill Everett would later join a small company called Timely where he created a character named Namor and, much later, a blind lawyer named Daredevil alongside Stan Lee himself. In other words, he was a Swiss Army knife of strange powers.
Amazing-Man was super strong, invulnerable, super fast, could heal himself, and practiced telekinesis. John Aman was raised by monks in Tibet for 25 years: each member of the Council of Seven, as they called themselves, taught him to master a different superpower, in addition to granting him the ability to disappear in a green mist. He was the second superhero in history to have his own comic book, and his story was, let’s say, unique.
The superhero that Everett (and perhaps his mother) ended up creating was like a toned-down version of Superman: Amazing-Man, who first appeared in issue #5 of ‘Amazing-Man Comics’… despite there being no preceding four issues. We’ve racked our brains trying to come up with a new type of character, but I can only think of going back to old folk tales, foreign if necessary, and trying to find some unusual character with which we can build an unusual story for these modern times.” We hope the mother at least received a little bit of copyright compensation. In fact, there’s a preserved letter where she asks another family member to help them: “He needs a new character for a strip that Jacquet wants him to create to compete with the new one called ‘Superman,’ I believe. That’s when the editor-in-chief, Lloyd Jacquet, asked Everett for “a Superman-like character.” The surprising part is that, since he couldn’t come up with anything, his mother rushed to his aid.
The thing is, while he was working at Centaur Comics, a publisher specializing in pulp and science fiction stories, no one saw the overwhelming success of Superman coming. That’s what Bill Everett thought, a young man who avoided becoming a truck driver like his father and, somewhere along the way, became a teenage alcoholic, a young marine, and eventually a talented comic book artist. In those years, being a comic book creator was a promising career (unlike now).
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