Yet, Hal Jordan’s blackest night came with the Emerald Twilight storyline from 1994, written by Ron Marz and penciled by Darryl Banks. Emerald Twilight spins out of the Reign of the Superman storyline happening in Superman comics, in which a cyborg who looks like Superman attacks the Earth, destroying Hal’s hometown of Coast City, killing everyone he loves, including on and off romantic interest Carol Ferris and his best friend Tom Kalmaku.
As a Green Lantern, Hal has the most powerful weapon in the universe on his finger. And he has more willpower than perhaps any other GL, especially when stricken with grief. So he initially uses his ring to rebuild the city. But when one ring proves insufficient to recreate a major metropolis full of people, Hal entreats the Guardians to either increase his power or send other GLs to help. The Guardians, as made abundantly clear in Lanterns, are capricious, untrustworthy jerks, so they refuse.
So Hal snaps. Most of Green Lantern #48–50 follows Hal as he attacks his fellow members of the Green Lantern Corps, stealing their rings and sapping the power from the Guardians. Hal even goes so far as to murder Kilowog, his friend and a respected Corps member. In a final desperate move, the Guardians resurrect Sinestro, the renegade Green Lantern, whose soul had been held in the Central Power Battery, the source of all GL power, since his execution years ago. But even he cannot stop Hal, who snaps Sinestro’s neck and, knowing that he’s gone too far, enters the Central Power Battery to claim as much power as he can.
The Rise of Parallax
When Hal emerges, he’s no longer Green Lantern. He now calls himself Parallax, and spends the next several years terrorizing the DC Universe and, for some readers, finally being interesting. It’s not just that Hal sometimes suffered from the same flat personality that many Silver Age heroes had; it’s also that the attempt to rewrite him as a more flawed, Marvel-style character in the ’70s sent him down a flawed path that could only end in villainy. Those readers found Hal’s replacement, Kyle Rayner—who becomes the last Green Lantern after the surviving Guardian Ganthet gathers enough power to make one more ring—far more compelling. Furthermore, Parallax was an interesting villain because he thought he was doing the right thing, constantly trying to remake reality to fit his vision of a better world, even if his former friends opposed him.
While those are all fine arguments for keeping Hal a villain, there’s one, undeniable point: Emerald Twilight was a terrible story. It stemmed from DC’s attempt to repeat the success of the Death of Superman storyline by ending an established hero and replacing them with a new, hip version. Batman gets his back broken in Knightfall and gets replaced by Jean-Paul Valley, the cool Batman with razor hands. Wonder Woman loses her title to Artemis, the angry hunter. Green Arrow blows up and gets replaced by his long-lost son Connor who… is actually a pretty cool guy, far more even-keeled than his dad.
Whatever the merits for or against forcing a legacy, Emerald Twilight not only rushed Hal’s heel turn, it also required a massive suspension of disbelief. Hal had proven himself an exemplary GL, for sure. But nothing in previous stories suggested that he could best legions of Lanterns working together, especially not elites like Kilowog. Moreover, Sinestro has always been a master manipulator and trickster. Why would he try to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Hal, which could only end with him getting his butt kicked?
