Green Turtle (comics)

The Green Turtle is a superhero originally published by Rural Home Publications. He first appeared in Blazing Comics #1 (June 1944), and was created by Chinese-American cartoonist Chu F. Hing. While the original run of the character lasted only five issues, the Green Turtle is notable for two factors. First, during WWII, the stories represented the Chinese in U.S. popular media as heroic partners fighting the Axis. One issue begins with the banner 美國及中華民國 (the United States united with the Chinese Republic), and features a U.S. general joining Chinese guerrillas in battle. During the war, U.S. depictions of the Pacific theatre were typically racialized; the "Yellow Peril" stereotypes applied to the Japanese were originally anti-Chinese and portrayed Asians as racial enemies of Western civilization. Second, the character is often identified as the first Asian-American comic book hero. These factors inspired a contemporary miniseries on the Green Turtle, The shadow Hero, by Gene Luen Yang, whose American Born Chinese was the first work in a comics format to be nominated for the National Book Award.

The superheroic Green Turtle, battling Japanese forces in wartime China, appeared in the first five issues of Blazing Comics (June 1944-March 1945) before it was discontinued after six issues and later fell into the public domain."