The Green Turtle

The Green Turtle is often cited as one of the earliest superheroes created by an Asian-American cartoonist. He appeared in Blazing Comics in 1944, the work of Chu F. Hing, and fought on the side of China against the Japanese invasion during World War II. The character is the subject of an enduring piece of comics lore: many have noted that his face is almost never clearly shown, and it has been widely suggested that Hing may have wanted his hero to be visibly Chinese and used artful staging to hint at that identity within the constraints of the market. Whatever the truth of that account, the Green Turtle stands as a landmark of representation from a period when Asian characters were far more often villains or caricatures. Because the original stories entered the public domain, the character was available for a celebrated modern revival: writer Gene Luen Yang and artist Sonny Liew reimagined his origin in an acclaimed graphic novel, giving the Green Turtle the fully developed Chinese-American backstory his creator was long rumored to have intended. He is a striking example of a forgotten hero recovered and made newly meaningful.