10 Comic Book Deaths That Angered The World
5. Hal Jordan (AKA Green Lantern)
During the events of The Return of Superman story arc, Coast City, home of the legendary Green Lantern Hal Jordan, was completely and utterly destroyed. Accordingly, an irate Jordan, the city's protector, helped a newly resurrected Superman take out the villains responsible (Mongul and The Cyborg Superman). The comics-reading world celebrated, but Green Lantern's trouble was just beginning...
In an effort to boost sales, DC editorial decided to kill another major hero, but this time, as a unique twist, they thought they'd turn him evil first. Unable to deal with the destruction of Coast City, Hal embarked on a quest to re-make the city he loved. When The Guardians of the Universe and the Green Lantern Corps tried to stop him, Hal simply killed them all, before adopting the name and identity of the evil Parallax. In DC's 1994 Zero Hour event, Hal went a step further even than that and attempted to re-write reality entirely. As the entire universe was nearly wiped out, Oliver Queen, Hal's best friend, shot him through the heart with an arrow. Finally, evil Hal achieved a measure of redemption by sacrificing his own life to save earths sun at the end of 1996's Final Night event.
Fans of Hal Jordan were, to put it bluntly, less than impressed. That the greatest of the Green Lanterns had died was bad enough, that he had died less than two years after trying to un-make reality was perceived as a massive step too far. For a decade, new GL Kyle Rayner served the universe as the last of the Green Lanterns, proving to be a compelling and likeable character in his own right, but, in 2004, the one-man event machine that is Geoff Johns reintroduced Hal Jordan, creating arguably the greatest retcon of all time when he suggested that Parallax was, in fact, a separate entity from Jordan and that it had taken over the Green Lantern's soul by exploiting his guilt and grief over the destruction of Coast City. Fans were much happier and on that day, we spelled redemption H A L.