Amazing-Man didn’t show up to his own comic until Amazing-Man Comics #5, but don’t worry – you didn’t miss anything. They just started with #5 because they wanted to set a precedent: Amazing-Man makes no sense, he takes no shit, and he gives no fucks. It’s not always as awesome as it sounds. When you truly no longer care about life or the living, sometimes you do rad shit like slap-fight a sasquatch, and sometimes you just poke somebody’s dog in the eye. Amazing-Man encompasses both extremes, and should serve as a simultaneous aspirational and cautionary tale for anyone who has just been made an amateur daredevil by their own crushing ennui.
Brockway: You gotta admire the moxie of those goons: their car has just been hefted into the air by a dude wearing nothing but Spanx, go-go boots, and a dog harness, yet still their only thought is to lean out the window to get a good enough angle to shoot at him. The Goon Union – the Goonion – better shell out for their funerals.
Seanbaby: People complain about how terrible the world is, but think how much awesome shit we must have when you can see a mostly nude man carrying a woman in one arm and a car full of people shooting him in the other and think, “That looks fucking stupi– hold up, MINIMIDGET? No Larger Than YOUR HAND HAS A WILD RIDE on a CARRIER PIGEON!? Forget everything I said about this sucking! Yes! YES!”
Seanbaby: It is so much wilder than any ride on a carrier pigeon you’ve ever seen!
Brockway: The fuck does Minimidget’s birdjacking egg rampage get third billing?! This is not a just universe.
Brockway: Fucking only Amazing-Man would bring a knife to an aerial balloon fight. Hahaha is that lady in the background also shooting at them? Amazing-Man is a devout Catholic trying to get away with suicide on a superhero technicality.
Seanbaby: You can’t get into Heaven if you’re killed by the penis a balloon pirate tore off a gorilla. It’s not a rule on the books, but it’s like how they can kick you out of a Sizzler for tearing the penis off a gorilla even if there’s not a sign.
Brockway: “Hit him with the stick, Tenzu.”
“Fuckin’ like shit I will – look at his face. He picked a fight with rocks and he’s about to rage-cry. You hit the emotionally broken superman with a piece of shitty wood.”
“…it’s your stick.”
“I know it’s my stick! That’s how I know how much it sucks!”
Seanbaby: I never know if everyone’s about to die, enjoying themselves, or not giving a shit on Amazing-Man covers. Even the people in them don’t know. Tenzu is losing his mind trying to figure out how he should react to whatever this shit is that’s going on. Is he threatening Amazing-Man with his log? Offering it as a bribe? Is stroking a log with your mittens how you give someone the finger in Tibet? Do you see how quickly we lose our minds looking at Amazing-Man!?
Seanbaby: Amazing-Man has decided to let the bad guy have the girl so he can go fistfight four housecats. You can tell from the villain’s face Amazing-Man is going way off-script.
Brockway: “Face” is being a bit generous. Dude looks like a villain placeholder. He has eyebrows and elf boots and that’s it. This barely counts as a drawing.
Seanbaby: Oh, that’s just what he looks like. He’s a grabby naked man covered in filth with no conceivable way of ever defeating Amazing-Man. Those cats, though– they didn’t have a fucking chance. We’re having a fun time with the covers, but inside Amazing-Man Comics it is only unforgivable molestation and artless cat mashing.
Brockway: By the look on that lady’s face, Amazing-Man is not here to save her from a rampaging lion. Her expression not only tells me that’s actually her lion, but that this is not the first time she’s asked Amazing-Man not to fight it.
Seanbaby: I don’t really blame him. If I saw a Star Empress in a throne room with a lion, I would just start punching it and assume her people had some kind of prophecy about her marrying the stranger brave enough to box her lion. I’d be so sure I would scream, “Our love will unite the Space Realms!” while I beat her treasured pet to death.
I should also mention that, like all his enemies, a domesticated lion is no match for Aman, the Amazing-Man. It was such an obvious outcome, the artist didn’t bother to draw the battle. It went from “man squares off against beast” to “dead lion bleeding out of its face” in zero panels.
Brockway: “Good god! What are you doing?! Th-the fucking shell was going to miss us by half a mile! Are you seriously trying to dunk that right now???”
Seanbaby: This is so fucking sweet, but by the time he lands and gets back to the battle, everyone who saw him do this pointlessly awesome thing will be dead.
Brockway: While Amazing-Man was off hang-gliding artillery rounds and just generally being “badical” decades before we had a proper word for it, the Nazis washed across Europe like a fascist tide. A lot of good people died needlessly, but most of the survivors do agree it was worth it to see Amazing-Man plug a tank barrel with his dick, Bugs Bunny-style.
Brockway: Amazing-Man has never met a protected species that didn’t need a swift punch in the face. But what’s really stealing the show is his intern back there, who probably needed a Zoology field credit and answered the wrong ad, so now he’s the Tommy the Boy Wonder and he has to try to spin ‘learned how to headlock a vulture’ into a life lesson so his professor doesn’t flunk him.
Seanbaby: Vultures normally wait for things to die in the desert and steal meat off their skeletons when no one is looking. It’s a behavior developed over millions of years. Today, one of them finally thought, “Guys, this would go so much faster if we killed the meat ourselves.” Amazing-Man is the worst possible meat they could have chosen for their first try at this. He’s “GIFTED WITH TWENTY MEN’S STRENGTH” and there is no one in the annals of literature who has beaten more animals to death with his hands. And Amazing-Man’s sidekick looks cranky because vulture punching is the toilet cleaning of a professional animal fighter’s job.
Seanbaby: Amazing-Man and his handsome boy are trashing Washington DC. Just barreling through walls and playing tag with missiles in our great nation’s capital. They even drew him a little beer cooler to let readers know, “Amazing-Man is taking an issue off from strangling wild animals to fucking party.”
Brockway: “These are some very impressive fieldnotes, Thomas! I don’t see any problem authorizing your internship. But this section here, where you wrote ‘studied policy at the nation’s capital’ – that’s a bit vague. Can you share a touch more detail?”
“…
…
…
no.”
Seanbaby: This snake was talking shit. He said Amazing-Man wouldn’t be so tough without all those arms and legs. Well, Amazing-Man called your bluff, snake! Your big mouth got you into this, snake!
Brockway: This is what happens when you try pantomiming “You. Give me. Blowjob.” to a pantsless suicide enthusiast.
Seanbaby: That does make more sense than a superhero tying himself up so he could have a fair, gentlemanly bite fight with a mouthy snake.
Brockway: “So we’re really just… hitting anybody that looks different than us, Mr. Amazing-Man, sir?”
“Please, Tommy, Mr. Amazing-Man was my father, and I strangled him with my belt when I was fourteen. You shouldn’t think of it as ‘hitting people different than us’ – because you shouldn’t think of them as people!”
“It’s uh… it’s Thomas, sir.”
“Haha, trust me: It’s Tommy.”
Seanbaby: To Tommy’s credit, can you imagine how absurd it would be if these 1942 green men said, “Thank you for not punching us! We are benevolent vulture men, not Nazi Bird Soldiers! By our suspenders, we vow to help humanity!” Come on. Ridiculous.
Brockway: I guarantee you, I promise you, I will lay any amount of money on this: Amazing-Man bought those gorillas, dyed them green, hot-glued Nazi headbands on them, and set them loose in town just so he’d have an excuse to fight them publicly. Strip them of their alien-ness and their evil symbology and check that image again. What are you really looking at there? The last thing these apes remembered was eating fistfuls of each other’s poop in the Congo and then the blissful sting of a tranquilizer dart. They woke up half-spun on paint fumes trying to pull some crap off their head and then watched Oobop take a suplex from a skinny pink monkey – look at their expressions! They’re not roaring. This is that Men in Black test. They are, every single one of them, absolutely fucking terrified.
Seanbaby: I, with twenty men’s strength, strongly disagree. Those are at least robots, if not full Fascist Martian Apes. Your constant assumptions that every rampaging green Nazi monster is simply being misunderstood as it travels between innocent endeavors is going to get you killed by Nazi Martian Gorillas. Amazing-Man might be a deranged naked man trying to die, but his punching instincts are never wrong.
Brockway: I will not fight like Amazing-Man. I’d rather die wrong than live with an innocent ape’s blood on my cock!
Seanbaby: “Ha ha what am I doing!? Fuck you, coal miners! May the last thing you see be these guns! Ha ha ha!”
Brockway: “Haha look at me, Tommy! I’m green energy! Whoosh! Zoom! Eat shit, coal!”
“S-some of these men have families, sir.”
“Had, Tommy. A hero is only as good as his grammar. These men had families.”