Chu F. Hing

• Born 1897-01-17 · Died 1967-08

Chu Fook Hing was a second-generation Chinese-American artist. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1920s, where he met his Danish-American wife, Helga. By 1943, the military draft for World War II had taken enough people from the nascent USA comics industry that Chu, Fred Eng, Ben Oda, Bob Fujitani, and other Asian-American artists began to work there. Although he signed his works ‘Chu F. Hing’, Chu was his family name and his colleagues in comics knew him as Hing Chu. He published in series such as “Blue Bolt” and “Target” at Novelty, the Curtis imprint, and at other publishers. From 1948, he was a staff inker at Timely (which would become Marvel). He left comics in the mid-1950s. Chu is remembered in particular for his creation ‘The Green Turtle’ in “Blazing Comics” (Rural Home, 1944). This Chinese-American superhero was revived and given an extensive back-story in “The Shadow Hero” by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew (First Second, 2014), who reinterpreted the Green Turtle as Chinese-American called Hank Chu. The surname “Chu” echoes that of the original creator. Hing also illustrated the first Filipino Kid story, in which Filipino Kid (Charlton, 1944), like Green Turtle, fought against the Japanese invasion of his country, He possibly did this without Rural Home's knowledge, since Green Turtle was still being published.