Marvel Comics has had a rough few years, full of dropping sales, public controversies, and departures by high-profile creators. After the exit of the previous editor Axel Alonso, Cebulski’s stewardship was supposed to be a fresh start, an opportunity to regain audiences’ trust. Instead, the company is having to deal with the fact that its new editor in chief was part of a larger pattern of white men posing as Asian for personal gain. Marvel’s apparently muted response has prompted frustration from some comics creators, critics, and readers—many of whom recognize how Cebulski was enabled by an industry that has long relied on pulp Asian stereotypes and struggled with hiring people of color.

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Cebulski, who has lived in Japan and is fluent in the language, was hired as an associate editor by Marvel in 2002, partly due to his background working with Japanese artists. (The initial press release jokingly referred to him as “C.B-san.”) He had written for the company before, including a stint on the short-lived “Marvel Mangaverse,” which filtered properties like Spider-Man and the X-Men through the lens of classic manga. Soon he was helping to oversee critical darlings like Runaways, now adapted into a new Hulu series. As Bleeding Cool explained, Cebulski’s position as an editor meant he wasn’t allowed to script comics for Marvel without special permission (and if granted permission, he couldn’t be paid extra for his work); yet he began pitching other companies under the Yoshida name in 2003. His work on the Dark Horse books Conan and Hellboy impressed another Marvel editor who, unaware of Yoshida’s real identity, asked Cebulski to pitch as well.

Throughout 2004 and 2005, Cebulski wrote several series for Marvel as Yoshida, including Thor: Son of Asgard and X-Men: Age of Apocalypse. Ninjas were a recurring theme in his work, as antagonists in Wolverine: Soultaker and Kitty Pryde: Shadow & Flame, and as main characters in Elektra: The Hand. As the site Comic Book Resources details, Yoshida had an elaborate backstory, which came to light as Cebulski took to giving interviews in character: He had spent time in the U.S. while growing up, had learned English via superhero comics, and had worked for a time at a small Japanese publisher. “My version of The Hand is greatly influenced by my love of Japanese history, [Akira] Kurosawa movies, and samurai manga, like Lone Wolf and Cub, Blade of the Immortal, and even Naruto,” Cebulski posing as Yoshida told the comics site Newsarama in 2004. Musing on the topic of cultural borrowing later in the same interview, he remarked that Japanese and Westerners found each others’ histories and cultures “mysterious” and “exciting,” which inspired them to create interesting comics.

Roughly a decade ago, when Cebulski took a position at Marvel that allowed him to openly write as well as edit, Yoshida abruptly disappeared. This didn’t go unnoticed: Rumors that the name had been a pseudonym for a Marvel editor soon began circulating online. Marvel staffers strenuously denied this, while the editor Mike Marts even claimed to have chatted about Godzilla with Yoshida over lunch. (According to Bleeding Cool, the man Marts spoke to was actually a visiting Japanese translator, which raises questions about why Marts said he had met Yoshida.) “I’ve brought most of the Japanese talent to Marvel and know all the writers and artists personally,” Cebulski wrote in a 2005 internet-forum post dismissing the rumors of a writer using an Asian name, before listing a group of Japanese creators that included Akira Yoshida. “I know of people at other companies who have gone the pseudonym route, but not at Marvel. I wonder if there’s someone I’m forgetting though … ”