10 Inappropriate Stories You Won't Believe DC Comics Published
8. The Refrigerator - Green Lantern #54 (1994)
During the 1990s, many readers were disappointed when Kyle Rayner became the new Green Lantern, with some believing he wasn't as interesting as Hal Jordan. When the writer, Ron Marz got wind of this, he wrote a story where the quantum-manipulating supervillain, Major Force, murdered Kyle's girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, and stuffed her remains in a refrigerator.
Readers found this story so gratuitously violent and insultingly sexist, it inspired the phrase "fridging". Fridging is when a female character is heavily injured or killed off solely to make a male character more interesting. Other examples would include Barbara Gordon being paralysed, Spoiler being tortured to death, or Susan Storm having a miscarriage. Even Deadpool 2 was accused of fridging since Wade's girlfriend died ten minutes into the movie.
After receiving so much negative feedback, you'd assume DC Comics would be more careful how they portrayed female characters. Instead, they killed off ANOTHER of Green Lantern's girlfriends, Arisia, two years later. Worse still, she was murdered by the same person, Major Force!
Just to prove DC Comics didn't learn anything, they had Hal Jordan lock Major Force in a fridge in Battle for Bludhaven several years later.