10 Things DC Comics Wants You To Forget About Green Lantern

6. The 'Women In Refrigerators' Debacle

green lantern fridge
DC Comics

You don't have to look far to see that that women haven't been treated particularly well in the comic book medium. The subject of killings, torture, depowerings and more, most male-led books have flirted with victimising female characters for the sake of shock value on numerous occasions, none more famous than the great refrigerator debacle of '94.

The Green Lantern at the time, Kyle Rayner, was dating Alexandra DeWitt. A photographer for a leading paper, Alex was Kyle's confidant and even helped him as he got to grips with his responsibilities as a Lantern. The relationship didn't last long though, as - almost out of the blue - DeWitt is murdered and stuffed into a fridge by Major Force, the antagonist during Ron Marz's tenure on the book.

The panel was immediately controversial, but took on a whole new life altogether when Gail Simone founded Women in Refrigerators in 1999. The site, founded by the writer along with Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Rob Harris, Beau Yarbrough and John Bartol, helped shift the conversation in the industry by collating instances where female comics characters were victimised, utilising DeWitt's death as a focal point for the movement.

'Women in Refrigerators syndrome' was coined, and the scene has been enshrined in comics criticism ever since.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.