First, during WWII, the stories represented the Chinese in U.S. popular media as heroic partners fighting the Axis.

These factors inspired a contemporary graphic novel on the Green Turtle, Shadow Hero, by Gene Luen Yang, whose American Born Chinese was the first work in a comics format to be nominated for the National Book Award.

[3] The Green Turtle aided the Chinese in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese invaders in World War II.

He had a sidekick, Burma Boy, a young beggar whom the Green Turtle rescued from execution by the Japanese army.

Though the significance of this is never established in the original series, it could be a visual reference to the Black Tortoise of Chinese mythology.