No he's 100% original. First mention of him was a little after Alabasta that Buggy was on a skull shaped island looking for only to find some random mining operation and getting roped into it. It was the same episode he ran into Ace. We finally see him amongst the General Zombie(Special zombies made from the corpses of famous warriors and pirates) at Thriller Bark. Another interesting zombie was Zoro's zombie Jigoro who was famous for having killed 7k to save his family.
There's a lot of curiosity about him since as farcical as it is, his look DOES slight resemble a samurai and if he might have been from Wano Country(probably not, but it was interesting theory that got brought up once).