His secret identity is Professor Archibald (Archie) Masters, an astronomy professor at an unnamed university in the Eastern United States.
The character debuted in 1941, his mousy alter-ego being similar to that of Superman's Clark Kent identity. He accidentally got caught in a room with a device called an atom smasher, and, inevitably, the experiment went awry. Instead of killing him, the accident blasted him with radiation, which endowed him with various superhuman abilities. He used these powers to fight crime as the American Crusader.
Prof. Masters had a secretary named Jane Peters. The Crusader had a teen sidekick named Mickey Martin.
In the mini-series Project Superpowers he's kept imprisoned and unconscious by a totalitarian government, and clones called Crusaders are created from his DNA to function as super-powered soldiers.
The Black Terror finds Archie and helps him to lure the Crusaders and destroy them, using the last of Archie's energy in the process; the Crusaders all die, and an African-American soldier named Marcus Chamberlain, who was with Archie and the Terror at the last moment, gains the power and becomes the new American Crusader.
The American Crusader first appeared in Thrilling comics #19 (1941) |
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