--If you don't care about back story and just want the meat of this article, skip this paragraph.--
In the nineties DC was facing times of dropped sales in some of their Silver Age titles due to younger audiences not really caring about the characters. One of these characters was Hal Jordan. So DC decided to introduce a NEW Green Lantern for the kiddies (Kyle Rayner for those who aren't aware) but needed to somehow do away with the current one. How did they do this? By making good ol' Hal go absolutely crazy and evil, that's how. The three part series EMERALD TWILIGHT begins with Green Lantern vol. 4 issue 48, following the aftermath of the destruction of Hal's city by Cyborg Superman and Mongul (you can Wikipedia that if you need more). Hal is grief-stricken and begins losing it. He starts creating constructs of his deceased parents, and eventually remakes his whole city. The "Guardians" of the Universe see this as a breach of protocol and drain his ring, pissing off Jordan to the point where he goes to their planet, killing any fellow comrade who gets in his way. After which he slams into the Power Battery of the Green Lanterns and destroys it, becoming the villain known as Parallax.
Emerald Twilight has been faced with extreme criticism over the years because it turned a hero that's been around for decades into a villain in only three issues, then introduced a useless pretty boy to take his place. Even now a mass majority of readers say Emerald Twilight was the worst thing to ever happen to the Green Lantern series. Here is where I disagree. Sure, if I grew up reading Silver Age Hal Jordan and then one day he just turns evil I *may* have been a little upset, but to continue that after seeing the current GL universe is completely unnecessary. Geoff Johns has taken that story and turned it into the springboard for literally EVERYTHING that has occurred in the past few years. Parallax turned out to be the entity of Fear, corrupting Hal to be a host, leading to the fallen Green Lantern Sinestro to use that yellow power of Fear to make his own corps, the introduction of the other color emotional corps, and so on. So yeah, A LOT of people hate Emerald Twilight, but to not at least accept that without it, all the great stories fans have now would probably not exist. I leave those people with two options: A world where Hal never went evil and the universe is different in every way nowadays, or have one hiccup in continuity, but use it to make a great run in the future. I for one, take the second option.
