This is No Yoke

The 60's was a different time. A time when the American public saw racial stereotypes as the norm for television and literature. So much so that the rinse and repeat enemy countries the US fought became the targets for some of the greatest comic book characters in history. Today we talk about the Z-List product of "the yellow menace", Egg Fu.

First appearing in "Wonder Woman #157" in 1965, Egg Fu was a house-sized egg-shaped creature with Asian features and was a Chinese Communist. His mannerisms and speech patterns were-at the time appropriately-littered with Asian/broken-English language. Also his mustache acted as limbs. Egg Fu had captured Wonder Woman's dumbo-in-distress Steve Trevor and experimented on him, turning him into a human bomb. Though she could not stop Trevor from exploding, Wonder Woman directed the ready-to-explode Trevor into a missile launched at a US army base. This saved the soldiers, but costed Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor their lives. Luckily, Wonder Woman's mother Queen Hippolyta used Amazonian technology (comics!) to revive them both. Once revived, Wonder Woman and Steve found they were still charged with explosion energy, energy they used to fight Egg Fu. Exposer to anti-matter in Egg Fu's lab rids Wonder Woman and Trevor of their explosive energy.

Egg Fu's threats would continue later with his 1966 successor "Egg Fu The Fifth" and his 1966 robot double "Dr. Yes" plotting against Wonder Woman and The Metal Men, respectively.

In 1997, Egg Fu was redesigned to be a nineteenth-century Chinese super-computer. Later in 2006, Egg Fu was renamed Chang Zhu and deemed an alien agent of the villain Darkseid. Unsurprisingly, Chang Zhu was often the enemy of the Chinese superhero team, The Great Ten. Recently, Egg Fu has appearing in the Harley Quinn solo comic where he admittedly experimented on the villain Poison Ivy, but has since tried to reform.

At this point in history, it is unnessecary to judge comic book characters on how they used to be portrayed racially, the same way people should not be judged the same way they used to because of their race or the events surrounding them. So for Egg Fu to be seen as anything but an embarrising villain who DC Comics had tried to reinvent before tossing aside for the Harley Quinn writers to use for satire is a waste of effort on the critics part. I myself see any Wonder Woman villain as one deserving of reconstruction (pardon the egg pun) as Superman and Batman have incredible galleries of villains I believe Wonder Woman should have her gallery retooled to update the character's stories. Regardless, this character is simply hilarious and his place alongside Harley is probably the best I could hope for a character who is literally a Chinese egg-person.

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