Summary The Shadow Hero is based on the adventures of the Green Turtle, who solved crimes and fought injustice just like any other comics hero of the 1940s. Still, readers never got a full look at the Green Turtle's face in the original series, which always showed the superhero in a mask.Label The Green Turtle Chronicles Title The Green Turtle Chronicles Creator So the Green Turtle's skin was colored a pinkish hue, unlike the light orange-y skin tone of the Chinese and Japanese characters. Fear of the so-called "yellow peril" was alive and well as World War II raged on in the Pacific. Rumor has it that the publisher thought a series about a superhero of Asian descent wouldn't sell. "When you look at original pages, you kind of see this fight between Chu and his publisher," says Yang, who also relied on graphic designer Alex Jay's research on Chu's background. There was another decades-long mystery that loomed over Yang: Did the Green Turtle's creator, Chinese-American artist Chu Hing, want his character to be Chinese-American like himself? So, instead, Yang connected the Green Turtle to the celestial tortoise, one of four guardian animal spirits of Chinese mythology. "There's a saying about wearing green hats, which means you are a cuckold." " 'Turtle head' is an insult in Chinese," says Yang, who is Chinese-American and adds that his parents would always tell him to not wear green hats. Yang wrote The Shadow Hero to finally give the Green Turtle an origin story and an explanation for his - let's be honest - not-so-heroic-sounding name. (You can see pages from the original series on the Digital Comic Museum's website.) Like Gotham's Dark Knight, the Green Turtle has his own plane, a cave for a home base, and a Robin-like sidekick called Burma Boy.īeyond those details, much about the Green Turtle remains unknown, as his storyline ended abruptly after five brief issues of Blazing Comics. "He doesn't have any explicit superpowers in the original books.
In terms of his fellow superheroes, Yang says the Green Turtle is more Bruce Wayne than Clark Kent. In the original series, the bare-chested Green Turtle looks like a lucha libre wrestler airlifted into the Pacific theater, defending America's allies in China against the invading Japanese army while donning a green cape and mask, plus "the little triangle pants that most superheroes wear," explains Yang, who was a finalist for the National Book Award for Boxers & Saints and American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be nominated.
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