The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang & Sonny Liew

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Gene Yang of Avatar the Last Airbender comics and Boxers & Saints explains the secret history of comics' first Asian American Superhero: THE SHADOW HERO

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The latest from Gene Luen Yang

The Shadow Hero
Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew



The Shadow Hero Gene Luen Yang The Green TurtleIn the comics boom of the 1940s, a legend was born: the Green Turtle. He solved crimes and fought injustice just like the other comics characters. But this mysterious masked crusader was hiding something more than your run-of-the-mill secret identity... The Green Turtle was the first Asian American super hero.

The comic had a short run before lapsing into obscurity, but the acclaimed author of American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang, with artwork by Sonny Liew, has finally revived this character in a new graphic novel that creates an origin story for the Green Turtle.

The following seven comic strips, originally published in black-and-white in the Shattered comics anthology, are collected here in color for the first time. Thrill to this short adventure of the Green Turtle, which takes place shortly after the events of the graphic novel!

They Came Here Not to Save Us, But to Live Among Us
Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew



Superheroes are about America. They were invented in America and they are most popular in America. Superheroes grew into a cultural force in the 1940’s, when America was growing into her role as a superpower. At their best, superheroes express America at our best. They embody our ideals of courage, justice, and sticking up for the little guy.

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.

Superman’s negotiation of identities reflects a daily reality for immigrants and their children. It’s no coincidence that Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane—the creators behind the world’s most famous superheroes—were all children of immigrants.

And maybe that’s why I loved superheroes so much when I was a kid. My parents are immigrants. Like Superman, I had two names, one American and the other foreign. I, too, lived in between two cultures. When he travelled from America to the bottle city of Kandor, one of the few remnants of his home culture, I felt a kinship with him. It was a bit like the shift from public school to Chinese language school that I had to go through every Saturday.

I’m certainly not the first to notice the connection between superheroes and immigrants. Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma constructed two comics anthologies around the idea: Secret Identities and Shattered. Both feature stories of Asian American superheroes by Asian American writers and artists.

In our graphic novel The Shadow Hero, available from First Second Books later this year, illustrator Sonny Liew and I explore the immigrant experience through the genre of superheroes. We tell the story of Hank Chu, a Chinese American teenager in 1930’s, a child of two immigrants. He loves working in his family’s modest grocery store, but his mother has bigger plans for him. She wants him to become a superhero and embody the excitement of their new home. As Hank learns to be a superhero, he also learns to be an American.

The following comic strip is the first of seven, originally published in black-and-white in the aforementioned Shattered comics anthology. Sonny and I are presenting it here, in color for the first time. We show Hank a little further in his superhero career, a few months after the events of our graphic novel.

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Enter to win KungFuMagazine.com's contest for THE SHADOW HERO Autographed by author Gene Luen Yang! Contest ends 6:00 p.m. PST on 07/10/14. Good luck everyone!

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...autographing prizes.

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See our THE SHADOW HERO Autographed by author Gene Luen Yang winners thread.

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WHY YOU NEED TO BE READING GENE LUEN YANG
ANDI MILLER 02-29-16
This post was originally published at Panels, our sister site about all things comics! Check out more from them here.

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When I hear of a graphic novel that really delves into history, I’m not always the first one to perk up. My tastes tend to lead toward kickass women doing heroic and fairly paranormal things. Think Lumberjanes and Gotham Academy. However, never one to poo-poo a creator without giving them a fair shake, I fell hard and fast for Gene Luen Yang from the beginning.

I picked up American Born Chinese as a graduate student, and I quickly adopted it for the classes I was teaching at university. It’s such a great blend of Chinese myth and legend intertwined with contemporary American prejudices and very real teenage struggles. I really had no idea how it would come together, but three threads…the Chinese monkey king, a Chinese-American student named Jin Wang, and a very stereotypical Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee, all blend into one amazing book that presents important lessons on the power of choice, identity, and transformation.

While American Born Chinese amazed me, it was the graphic novel duo, Boxers & Saints, that really cemented my awe of Yang’s storytelling ability.



The first book, Boxers, is set in 1898 when a Chinese boy named Little Bao is sucked into the grassroots Boxer Rebellion. He feels it’s his and his peers’ responsibilities to harness the power of the Chinese gods (much like the Monkey King in American Born Chinese) and rid the country of “foreign devils,” or Christian missionaries who pose a threat to Chinese culture and peace.

The flip-side of the Rebellion is represented in Saints when a young girl, unwanted by her family, is cast out and adopted by Christian missionaries. Nameless, she adopts a saint’s name, Vibiana, and has visions of Joan of Arc. She lives at peace with the Christians until the Rebellion finds them.

What Yang does so well, and what’s so hard to explain to a person who hasn’t read these books, is how well he portrays the gray area in an ideological argument. For the reader, experiencing the Rebellion from both sides, it’s easy to see how Little Bao and Vibiana were warranted in taking sides but how much they still have in common…how misunderstanding and a lack of objectivity can be detrimental to all. It’s a pertinent message in today’s political and ideological climate for sure.



While I didn’t think it could get any better than Boxers & Saints, one of his newer works, The Shadow Hero (with art by Sonny Liew), is pretty darn close even though it’s very different.

Again, Yang takes a historical approach with a twist. Hank, the hero of the title, lives in Chinatown during the Tong Wars, a period in the late 1880s to early 1920s, when warring Chinese gangs controlled the economy of Chinatown. Hank is proud to work in his father’s grocery store, and has no plans to do otherwise, until the day that the Tong Wars infringe on his family life. With his mother’s help (pushiness!) he is motivated to avenge a great wrong done to this family, Hank becomes the Green Turtle…a superhero. He also inherits a Chinese spirit god who lives in his shadow and helps out from time to time.

It’s a unique story, no doubt, but what makes it even richer is the history behind the Green Turtle. Not the Tong Wars exclusively, which were totally new to me, but when I did a little digging, I found out that the Green Turtle was the first Asian American superhero, created by Chu Hing in the 1940s for Blazing Comics. Yang revived the character to give him an origin story in The Shadow Hero.

Yang’s work is so deep and multifaceted that you can read it on a surface level and find a great story, but if you do a little digging (ok, Googling) there are depths to plumb that you may not have imagined. It makes for a rich, rewarding reading experience every single time.

Gene's work is pretty cool, and I'm not just saying that because we have the same name...which is pretty cool.

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