The Shadow Hero

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The Shadow Hero
The Shadow Hero review
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  • North American Publisher / ISBN: First Second - 978-1-5964-3697-8
  • Release date: 2014
  • UPC: 9781596436978
  • Contains adult content?: no
  • Does this pass the Bechdel test?: no
  • Positive minority portrayal?: yes

Hank is born in the USA to Chinese immigrant parents. When they arrived his mother was soon disabused of romantic notions about New York, and considers Hank’s father lacks ambition for only wanting to run a grocery store. Their marriage becomes one of staid convenience and tolerance as Hank grows into a young man. Everything changes when his mother meets a superhero, is overcome by the glamour and decides Hank is ideally suited to that trade. However, readers have seen Hank’s father has a secret he’s hidden for decades.

The Shadow Hero is a clever blending of seeming myth with superhero archetypes, yet also a commentary on race and social inequality, while never forgetting to entertain. Gene Luen Yang mines his Chinese cultural heritage and adeptly switches from humour to shock and even tragedy in what’s homage to the simpler superhero comics of the 1940s. Yet despite his mother’s forceful spurring, Hank is a poor superhero until the moment everything changes.

The many moods make life difficult for artist Sonny Liew, and while an excellent cartoonist there are places where he opts for the wrong tone. In others, though, he’s exactly right, and the most memorable images deal with myths. Eventually the misplaced exaggerations lapse because Yang moves into different territory.

Hank eventually develops a super power, which is no random moment as it has been foreshadowed, but Yang supplies a good twist on a standard superhero ability. That sort of unconventionality develops into a theme. What’s it like to be a superhero in the rain? Other revelations would move into spoiler territory, but they’re thoughtful and surprising, and sometimes funny. The use of racial insults also surprises. As it’s not a great issue until well into the story the presumption might be of Yang glossing over that aspect, but instead he’s saving it for a powerful moment.

Everything ties together very neatly by the end, with no scene introducing new information being just a random inclusion, even if in some cases the pay-off is a long time in coming. It’s indicative how the plot moments are always thoughtful, yet it’s never at the cost of realistic emotional responses, and yet this remains a project to fit smoothly into First Second’s line of young adult graphic novels.

Yang drops a final surprise when his story is finished, and it’s another worth keeping under wraps, but it contextualises much of what’s gone before. It’s considered difficult to do anything original with superheroes as their breed has been around since the late 1930s, but perhaps intelligence and a little more thought are all that’s required. It’s applied to The Shadow Hero.

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