Wing
1874 - Wing Hu is born in rural Tibet.
1879 - 5-year-old Wing's family makes the trek to Nanda Parbat to escape a famine.
1897 - 23-year-old Wing first meets Lee Walker Travis when he comes to Nanda Parbat. Seeing how hopeless he is, Wing begins to mentor Travis in the arts of their city.
1904 - 30-year-old Wing, believing in Lee Walker Travis's calling, travels with him to the states and poses as his valet to help build the informant infrastructure of the Crimson Avenger.
1909 - 35-year-old Wing first dons a mask to help Lee Walker Travis fight crime.
1917 - 43-year-old Wing & Lee Walker Travis travel to Europe to fight in WWI.
1919 - 45-year-old Wing & Lee Walker Travis return from the War. Wing Is married. With Travis unable to adventure as often, he begins to sometimes work alone.
1929 - 55-year-old Wing's longtime friend Lee Walker Travis dies. He stays in the states, continuing to fight crime.
1933 - 59-year-old Wing finally retires at the request of his wife.
1945 - 71-year-old Wing dies in his sleep of a cerebral edema.
Before anyone says so.... yes we're very aware of just how much of the art on this page isn't TECHNICALLY Wing. I'm willing to bet that pretty much anyone reading this will already know exactly why we did that. DC isn't alone in creating characters that are only barely legally distinct from characters owned by other companies... they all do it. but sometimes those weird relationships between characters can take you to some very interesting places.
Wing's Comic HistoryWe are speaking in incredibly broad generalities here, so please take this with a grain of salt, but GENERALLY speaking, the comic industries absolutely atrocious history of depicting Asian characters as grotesque stereotypes became commonplace after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Before that, Asian representation was still embarrassingly minimal, but the characters were generally depicted as passive and subservient, rather than as horrible caricatures. still not great, obviously, but nowhere near as bad as what came later.
The reason I'm pointing this out is because when Crimson Avenger appeared in Detective Comics #20 way back in 1937 and introduced his chauffeur Wing they were clearly riffing on the very successful Green Hornet radio show and his chauffeur Kato. Both Wing & Kato were depicted as very capable allies to the title hero, and even though they were obviously servants they were still part of the adventure. As the Crimson Avenger continued to appear deeper into the Golden Age, the depictions of Wing started to slide into the same culture of gross stereotype as the rest of the industry, and I think we can just call an audible here and decide to completely ignore that any of that ever existed. |
The Obvious Thing We're Doing HereThe Crimson Avenger and the depictions of his sidekick have never really had any sort of redemptive arc, and in a vacuum a depiction of the character should probably not include Wing just to avoid the unpleasantness. However, our take on Crimson Avenger is a deliberate pastiche of both the Shadow and Green Hornet, and if we're going to talk about Green Hornet, then we definitely need to talk about Kato.
I can't imagine a person could be this deep into this website and not know this, but the character Green Hornet, after several TV serials, got his own live-action TV series in 1966, the same year as the Adam West Batman. In the series, Kato happened to be played by a certain young man whose name is probably going to be remembered centuries from now as one of the most beloved figures in the history of action cinema. Bruce Lee's influence on Asian representation in media is probably only comparable to Linda Carter's feminist icon status. Kato, by extension, has had his role in the modern adventures of Green Hornet aggressively reimagined as a major part of the story, with his daughter even becoming the central figure of their narrative. So in our telling of Crimson Avenger, where we get to decide what parts of Green Hornet we want to adapt, there is no way on Earth we're not also adapting one of the greatest sidekicks ever invented. |