The Origin of Amadeus Cho, Part 3: Atonement

Tucson, Arizona: Months Ago[1]

Amadeus Cho had just won the Brain Fight internet quiz put out by the Excello Soap Company. He had won the grand prize and was named the seventh smartest person in the world. Elated, Cho rode his scooter home and on the way he spotted an attractive girl reading a book at a bus stop. Feeling emboldened by his win he chatted her up and got her phone number. This delayed his arrival by ten minutes. That delay was just long enough that he was outside when a bomb blew up his family home and killed his parents.[2]

The news had said the blast was caused by a faulty stove valve, but Amadeus knew in the pit of his stomach that the blast was anything but….

Excello, Utah: Now

Standing in the crater of what the former town,[3] Amadeus confronts Athena over the fact that she knew his parents were slated to die and she did nothing. Athena tells him that the gods don’t work that way and her job was to provide sign posts and that mortals must choose their own path. Amadeus also wants to know if she has told Hercules that his training has been for replacing Herc. Athena says Amadeus can tell Hercules this if he likes, but he thinks she is bluffing him somehow.

When Amadeus starts heading to the shack at the bottom of the Excello crater, Athena asks him what he plans on doing. He reminds her that Pythagoras Dupree was responsible for the death of his parents and that he intends to find out what he knows about his missing sister.[4] He also promises that only one of them is walking out of that room alive. Athena believes that Amadeus is fortunate to finally have someone to blame for the death of his parents. Usually, people don’t have anyone to blame but the gods. That’s when she vanishes, leaving behind the book about the Hero’s Journey that Amadeus has been reading through this entire trip. Opening the book, he reads the next part of the journey, the so-called “Atonement with the Father”. In literary terms, this is the passing of the flame from one generation to the other. Or, in other words, where the hero puts aside childish things and becomes the cosmic father. Amadeus scoffs at this idea and tosses the book away before heading down to the shack.

Inside, he finds a radio studio where Pythagoras Dupree — an old man confined to a wheelchair — is reciting his latest chapter in the Mastermind Excello radio program. When Cho enters the room, he stops what he is doing and the first thing he asks Amadeus when the first time he started inventing new imaginary worlds as an escape from the real one and all its hurts. Amadeus recalls it was in the fourth grade, where he was relentlessly bullied by racist classmates. Amadeus found his escape in role playing games where he was able to use his imagination to come up with creative scenarios and adventures.

Pythagoras tells his own story: He grew up at the Mount Athena Orphanage in upstate New York. It was run by a woman named Miranda Minerva who was obsessed with the connections between myth and reality. In fact, she was the woman who wrote the book on the hero’s journey that Amadeus had been reading this whole time. She constantly tested the children’s intelligence and Dupree scored the highest of them all. This didn’t go unnoticed by the other orphans who were jealous that Pythagoras was Miss Minerva’s prized pupil and would beat him up for it. His escape from this were the Mastermind Excello radio program, which told the fictionalized adventures of the wartime hero. However, Excello disappeared during the Battle of Berlin without explanation.[4]

The concept that Excello could fail frightened young Pythagoras so much that he would find a way to avoid this same fate. He ran away from the orphanage and as he grew up he used his vast intelligence to make a killing in the stock market. This allowed him to buy the Excello Soap Company and the town it founded. He did so out of love of the radio program they sponsored. It was here that he was visited by Miranda Minerva again, this time in her true form of Athena. She told him that she was seeking a hypermind for a great task that was coming. In ancient times, she championed strength when she chose Hercules to be her avatar. This was because the Earth was plagued by monsters that threatened the Earth. However, in modern times, all these monsters were now dead and reason ruled instead of gods. Athena knew that a great darkness was coming to engulf the world and this time they would need a champion of the mind.[5]

Pythagoras told her that he’d think about it, but instead he blew up the entire town and retreated into his “bubble universes” to hide himself. However, he feared that Athena could find other hyperminds that might be able to find him and so he used his company to locate and eliminate these geniuses before they could. He was assisted in this endeavor by a cash infusion from the Olympus Group. While most of the murders were done in a subtle fashion, Amadeus Cho was a special case since he scored a higher intelligence than Pythagoras, hence why he tried blowing him up with a bomb.

That’s when Amadeus interrupts the monologue as he is not at all interested in hearing Dupree’s life story, and demands to know what he has done with his sister. Dupree is confused because he honestly didn’t know that Amadeus even had a sister. The paranoid lunatic then thinks this is some kind of trick and pulls a gun on Amadeus. He then challenges him to a hypermind’s version of Russian Roulette. Pythagoras believes that he can counteract any formula Amadeus can come up with to avoid getting shot. After thinking it over for a moment, Amadeus instead turns around to leave. He tells Dupree that all he is interested in was learning what happened to his sister. Since Pythagoras doesn’t know, he has no interest in playing his games. He will also put Dupree out of his mind and go on with his life and once Amadeus forgets all about Dupree, it will be like he never existed. As Amadeus walks out of the room, Pythagoras turns the gun on himself instead. Hearing the gunshot, Amadeus breaks down and mourns the loss of his parents.[6]

After he composes himself, Amadeus sees a door marked “Continuum” and decides to look inside. Opening the door, he is blinded by a bright light and what he sees horrifies him.

When Amadeus emerges from the shack, he tells Athena that he chose not to kill Pythagoras because revenge is a childish emotion. He also came to realize that the girl that distracted him at the bus stop was Athena in disguise as well and that she saved his life back then. Athena says Amadeus saved himself, and that she erred in trying to make Pythagoras her champion. After she failed with him she realized that she would need someone else to train a new champion in her place. She saw the opportunity at the dawn of the Age of Marvels, when she saw that the Asgardian Thor was walking among mortals once more.[7] She used this to convince Zeus to send Hercules back down to Earth.[8] She knew that fate would cause Hercules and her future champion to be drawn together so they could prepare each other for the battle ahead. When she says that there is much to prepare for, Amadeus says it has to wait and shows her a book about what the Olympus Group’s Continuum is.[8] As Athena reads it she is just as horrified as Amadeus and they both agree that it is time to find Hercules!

Meanwhile, in Alphabet City, New York, May Parker has convinced the goddess Hebe to work in the soup kitchen at FEAST.[10] Hebe prepares a batch of her ambrosia which has a positive effect on the people who eat it. May is impressed by the change in their patrons but is completely oblivious to the fact that Hebe is an Olympian god. May then introduces Hebe to her nephew, Peter Parker (who is secretly Spider-Man), in the hopes of setting the two of them up on a date. When Peter meets Hebe he jokingly tells her that she just hit the jackpot![11]

Recurring Characters

Amadeus Cho, Athena, Pythagoras Dupree

Continuity Notes

1. The events of this opening flashback take place prior to the events of Amazing Fantasy (vol. 2) #15. The events of Amazing Fantasy (vol. 2) #15 were published in January, 2006, while this issue was published in December, 2009. Based on the Sliding Timescale, these two events happened a little under a year from one another. This story states that Amadeus was 15 when his parents died. Since the death of his parents happened in “Year Thirteen” of the modern age, this means that Amadeus was born 2 years prior to the start of the Modern Age.

2. As explained in Incredible Hercules #133, the town was destroyed when the Excello Soap factory exploded back in 1978.

3. Amadeus learned that his sister wasn’t home when his parents were killed after he met with his parents in the afterlife, as seen in Incredible Hercules #131. We actually won’t see Maddy Cho until Totally Awesome Hulk #1.

4. Mastermind Excello was among a group of minor wartime heroes that were put in suspended animation by the Nazis and wouldn’t be discovered and revived until the modern age. See The Twelve #1-12. How Pythagoras Dupree could have been a child during World War II and still be alive in the Modern Age is unexplained. See below.

5. This is the threat posed by the Japanese god Amatsu-Mikaboshi, who will try to destroy everything in Chaos War #1-5.

6. While we see Pythagoras put the gun to his head, he seemingly shoots himself off panel. His death is confirmed by Hera in Assault on New Olympus #1. As of this writing (September, 2024) she is still considered among the deceased.

7. The flashback here depicts when Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp first formed the Avengers to battle Loki as seen in Avengers #1.

8. Which happened back in Thor #124.

9. Continuum is a replacement Earth that will wipe out all the original, making it free of historical baggage and more palatable to Olympians. See Assault on New Olympus #1 and Incredible Hercules #138-141.

10. May Parker has been volunteering at FEAST since Amazing Spider-Man #546.

11. Peter specifically states “Face it tigress, you hit the jackpot!” Which is a play on the words his ex-girlfriend Mary Jane Watson said to him when they first met in Amazing Spider-Man #42.

Topical References

• The kids bullying Amadeus call Amadeus “Charlie” and talk about dropping napalm. These are all references to the Vietnam War the term “Charlie” being short for “Victor Charlie” which was military code for referring to the Viet Cong Army during that conflict. It eventually evolved into a racial epitaph referring to Vietnamese people. Calling Amadeus “Charlie” doesn’t make any sense given that Cho is actually of Korean ancestry. But then again, bigots aren’t exactly known for cultural awareness or intelligences. That said I think the Vietnam War specific racism on display here would be considered topical since (sadly) bigotry still exists and racists find new and inventive ways to be shitheads. I also feel that this is probably a personal experience of writer Greg Pak, an Korean-American who grew up in Texas. Pak was born in 1968, so it would make sense that the racism he experienced in school would have been tied to the Vietnam War.

Pythagoras Dupree and His Connection to World War II

The origin for Pythagoras Dupree given here has his childhood rooted in the 1940s. Particularly with its depictions of the orphanage system of the era as well as his obsession with the Mastermind Excello radio program. When this story was published in 2009, it was entirely possible for someone who grew up in the 1940s to still be alive in the Modern Age. However, as the Sliding Timescale bumps the Modern Age forward it increases the number of years between the 1940s and the present day, thus radically aging any date locked characters. This would make it increasingly impossible for someone like Pythagoras to still be alive without some means of artificially extending, slowing, or stopping the aging process.

That all said, as of this writing (September, 2024), Marvel has yet to provide an explanation for Dupree’s longevity. The Athena profile of Women of Marvel: Celebrating Seven Decades handbook does confirm that Dupree’s early life took place in the 20th Century.

I think that the simplest explanation is the fact that Dupree hid in the Bubble Universes he created. I think it isn’t impossible that those synthetic realities gave him the means of slowing his aging process or prolonged his life in some way.