The Green Turtle Chronicles by Gene Luen Yang

So Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Batman was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, they were all the children of these Jewish immigrants.

It’s about being an immigrant’s kid and if you look at the major superheroes out there: Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, they were all created by immigrants kids. The underlying immigration metaphor in the superhero story isn’t lost on most fans and with The Shadow Hero, Yang was ready to move the metaphor into the foreground of the story. “I think Shadow Hero is really about the immigrant experience. He’s definitely hiding something from you.” I don’t know if that’s true, it’s just a rumor, but when you look at the original pages, you can definitely see it. And then when he’s turned around something is blocking his face, like another character standing right there or there’s a piece of furniture that juts out and covers his face or he’s punching and his arm will be in the way and the rumor is that Chu Hing did this so that he could imagine his character as a Chinese American as he originally intended. Yang continued, “In the original Green Turtle comics, they were published in this series called Blazing Comics, you never see the Green Turtles face, so he almost always has his back to the reader. The rumor is that Chu Hing originally wanted him to be a Chinese American superhero but is publishers wouldn’t let him do it and then Chu Hing being a cartoonist, cartoonists, how we deal with adversity is we just react very passive aggressively, so that’s what he did.”

So I went on one day and I read this entry about him and there’s this rumor about the Green Turtle. What they do on that blog is they’ll feature these really obscure characters, from the 1940s, superhero characters from the 1940s and they’ll do one or two a week. The Green Turtle was actually created in the 1940s by a Chinese American cartoonist named Chu Hing and I first found out about him on the internet, on this blog called Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. Sonny and I did not create the Green Turtle. He explained, “ The Shadow Hero is our version of this superhero called the Green Turtle and the Green Turtle is not our invention. While The Shadow Hero comic was released in July 2014, comic book author Gene Luen Yang told us that the history of the character actually goes back decades. Nerdist talked to Yang about the Shadow Hero and his true origin story, superheroes and immigration and the oft quoted notion of, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Gene Luen Yang might be best known for his graphic novel American Born Chinese and his work on the Avatar: The Last Airbender comic but last month Yang premiered his latest adventure, The Shadow Hero, based on the Green Turtle character of the 1940s.

The Green Turtle Chronicles by Gene Luen Yang