Green Turtle

• Also known as

The Green Turtle is a comic book character from a World War II, portrayed as a masked hero who fights alongside Chinese guerrillas against Japanese forces. He was created by Chu F. Hing, a Chinese-American artist born in Hawaii, and was originally conceived as a Chinese superhero. However, the publisher prevented this from being stated explicitly. In defiance of this restriction, Hing never revealed the hero’s face, leaving his true identity a lasting mystery. In Hing’s own stories, the character is referred to as Ching Quai by other Chinese characters, a non-standard romanization of the Mandarin name 青龜. In the Wade–Giles system, widely used before the adoption of modern pinyin in the late 1950s, the name would be rendered as Ch’ing Kuei, while in pinyin it is written as Qīng Guī, both meaning “Green Turtle.” In the 2010s, the character was revisited by Gene Luen Yang and Sonnie Liew, who reinterpreted the Green Turtle as Chinese-American called Hank Chu. The surname “Chu” echoes that of the original creator.