Amazing-Man Comics

Amazing-Man Comics launched in 1939 from Centaur Publications, and its enduring significance rests largely on its creator: Bill Everett, the artist and writer who in the very same era created the Sub-Mariner, one of the earliest and most important superheroes. Here, Everett gave readers Amazing-Man, a hero raised and trained by a secretive order in Tibet, from whom he gained extraordinary abilities before returning to fight evil.

Centaur was one of the pioneering Golden Age publishers—an early producer of original comic-book material at a moment when much of the industry still relied on reprints—and it served as an incubator for talent who would go on to shape the medium. Everett's work on Amazing-Man showcased the moody atmosphere and dynamic figure work that made him one of the period's most admired craftsmen.

Though Centaur was short-lived and is long defunct, its influence outlasted it through the careers it launched. Because the company's copyrights lapsed, Amazing-Man Comics is now in the public domain—preserving early work by a genuine master and offering a look at the formative, experimental first years of the superhero comic before the format's conventions had fully set.