Restaging the Superhero Spectacle
Green Turtle’s Shame, The Shadow Hero ’s Reparative Aesthetics, and the Chinese Diaspora’s Speculative Historiography of Golden Age Comics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272196 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kai Hang Cheang (University of California, Riverside, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 80-103 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mly049 |
| OpenAlex | W2905864173 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
This essay examines the aesthetic and affective contours of The Shadow Hero (2014), Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s reimagination of the Green Turtle, a Golden Age superhero who appeared in a five-issue series for Blazing Comics (1944-45), and then fell into obscurity. Employing Eve Sedgewick’s queer reading of peri-performative signs and somatic manifestations of shame, this essay undertakes a two-fold historiographical mission: first, it reinterprets the mystery and strangeness around the original Green Turtle as signs of distress left by the author, Chu F. Hing, to indicate his racial abjection while working in the comic industry in the midst of a period of Yellow Peril. Then the essay traces how Yang and Liew use the veiled Asianness of Chu’s Green Turtle as the foundation for their imagination of the superhero’s forthright Asian American identity; it does so by examining the creative duo’s incorporation of the original character’s visual elements (from the weird tinge of pink in his complexion to his signature cape on which is printed a turtle shell) along with his affective accents (including his racial and national shame) into his makeover. Taken together, this essay contends that The Shadow Hero is a reparative text that emerges out of the longue durée of the Chinese diaspora, in which Yang (of San Francisco) and Liew (of Singapore) piece back together the Green Turtle’s broken parts and loose ends in The Green Turtle by Chu (of Hawaii), transforming Chu’s racially obscured Golden Age comic into an empowering Asian immigrant story of double identities.
Aesthetics · Art · Comics · Diaspora · Embodied cognition · HERO · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology) · Shame · Sociology · Spectacle · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |