Huh. So, not long after the last column in this series went live, I went to read the next issue (for me) of Immortal Thor and saw the character dead. Is he still dead? I don’t know. Point is, I left that out when I wrote the column on that guy up.
As for this week, well, Denzel Washington just said something about having a part written for him in Black Panther 3, so who would he play? And I think maybe there is a Marvel character that would fit him very well in the form of Dr. Adam Brashear, the Blue Marvel.
Brashear first appeared in his own mini-series, Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel, with the first issue dated November 2008. The story came from writer Kevin Grevioux and artist Mat Broome and related the story of an earlier African American hero that first appeared in the 1960s and then disappeared to the point where many heroes in the present day had never heard of him. Brashear’s backstory was that, in the 60s, he was this great hero who disappeared one day. There was a reason for that: he was a black man hiding his face beneath a bodysuit that covered every inch of skin, and then the mask got a bit ripped, he was asked personally by President Kennedy (possibly while getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom) to please knock off the heroics. Kennedy, as written, didn’t want to do it, but he was concerned about racial tensions in the country, and I vaguely recall another government official, possibly J. Edgar Hoover, was really pushing for it. As it is, Brashear agreed to stop being the Blue Marvel, and he sort of stopped being a superhero for a couple decades.
Anyway, that’s why he disappeared. What was the rest of his story? Brashear was a decorated Marine, Korean War vet, and college football player who, as a Marine, met a man named Conner Sims. Sims, a white man, was violently against racism, but the pair hit it off and went to work. As Brashear had a genius-level intellect, he was working on a way to use anti-matter through the Negative Zone to empower a “Negative Reactor,” but this is a comic book, so everything went wrong. The resulting explosion reduced Simms to an energy form where he went a bit insane and lashed out quite a bit as Brashear’s archenemy the Anti-Man, but Brashear’s body stabilized, allowing him to be basically a living anti-matter reactor. Taking the superhero name the Blue Marvel, he went off to fight evil where he could. His powers included colossal strength of the highest order, an indestructible body, all kinds of energy-based powers, and he started to age very slowly. Combined with his genius-level intellect, and he was the epitome of the Marvel Silver Age hero in a sense.
However, after JFK asked him to retire, in a justified funk, he flew off to the Blue Area of the Moon, met Uatu the Watcher, and after dropping off the Medal of Freedom, he saw an alien invasion coming in. Stopping the aliens resulted in some large explosions, but the US Government was able to use that to fake Brashear’s death, and he would go off, marry his white girlfriend Candace (actually an undercover SHIELD agent named Marlene Frazier), took a job as a physics professor, and had three kids. Over the decades, he’d still do some quiet do-gooding, often with his oldest son Kevin, under the name Doc Brashear.
Then in the “present” day, Anti-Man returned and easily defeated the Avengers. At a loss, Iron Man learned the Blue Marvel existed and went off to find the guy with a little help from Reed Richards. Tony had never heard of the guy but found him easily enough. Learning that his wife was originally sent to spy on him before she legitimately fell in love with him (Brashear forgave her later), Brashear suited up as the Blue Marvel again to fight his old pal the Anti-Man again.
Now, normally that might be the last we see of the guy, but the character took off after that, soon having him appear on various Avengers and Ultimates rosters, during one such term he started a romantic relationship with teammate Photon.
I guess the “forgiving the wife” thing didn’t last, or she died of old age. These things happen. He aged slowly, but she sure didn’t. Regardless, the Blue Marvel, for a character that doesn’t seem to get a much solo adventures, is a somewhat prominent Marvel hero that I think Denzel Washington could probably play pretty well, especially since Blue Marvel’s backstory showed there was one modern-day hero that remembered him when he returned, namely Namor since Captain America was still frozen in ice during that period. If anything, Blue Marvel’s time with the Ultimates was the most interesting as that team was looking to solve problems, and that included getting the Anti-Man the right sort of treatment so he and Brashear could be friends again, to say nothing of making Galactus a planet-creator instead of a planet-eater. Most recently, Brashear was a part of an Illuminati team that took on Thanos. He may not have his own title, but I don’t think the Blue Marvel is going anywhere anytime soon.
His wife actually died in the same miniseries.