Profile: Gloss

Gloss

Real name: Xiang Po
First appearance: Millenium #2, January 1988

History:
The Guardians who created the Green Lantern Corps invested in a Millenium Project to form a group of successors on Earth, which saw 10 people gathered together to learn about the cosmos and be granted special powers. One of them was the young Chinese girl Xiang Po, whom the Guardians bestowed the power to draw energy from the Earth's "dragon lines". She'd go on to form the New Guardians group, which had a brief series in 1988-89 running 12 issues and whose cast was partly comprised of characters from the GL series, whose 2nd volume had ended in 1988.

Was subjected to the following act of discrmination: during the Justice League: Cry for Justice miniseries written by James Robinson in 2009, she was one several characters killed off by Prometheus.

What's wrong with how this was done? The miniseries was notorious for serving as a cheap excuse to kill off almost any minor character the DC editors considered expendable, including Lian Harper. All for no good reason, and just to serve as justification for Green Arrow to kill off Prometheus later...and then get into a pointless clash with the Justice League, made to look as though they have zero understanding of the terrible incident Prometheus caused. One can only wonder if it was all intended as an anti-war metaphor, since this was in the years after the war in Iraq to bring down Saddam.

And it all gave the Justice League a very bad name, while doing nothing more than throwing Steve Englehart and Joe Staton's creation Gloss, who could've had potential on her own under the right kind of writers, into oblivion as though her being fictional makes her automatically worthless. I think the New Guardians series was mediocre, but that's mainly the fault of Englehart and Cary Bates (the latter who wrote the majority of the book), not the characters, some of whom were given very unfair treatment.

Profile: Harbinger

Harbinger
Real name: Lyla Michaels

First appearance: New Teen Titans Annual #2, 1983

History: an orphan who survived a shipwreck, she was rescued by the Monitor (the being stuck in an eternal fight with the anti-Monitor), and became an assistant to him during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, where she would help arrange for henchmen and weapons to test the superheroes in the impending war. After her appearance in the Millenium crossover of 1988, she joined the New Guardians, who were partially connected with the Green Lantern Corps.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: in the 12-issue New Guardians series, she, along with almost all the other team members, was subjected to the AIDS virus; one of the first stories in comics to address the subject that was big in the 80s. In 2004, when DC was reintroducing the original Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, to the DCU, she turned up in a guest appearance on Wonder Woman's Themyscira island, and was killed while defending Kara from the forces of Darkseid that would kidnap her for his own uses. Her corpse was later reanimated during the Blackest Night crossover.

What's wrong with how this was done? This had to be one of the cheapest paths they could go in to pointlessly kill off a character who could've still had her uses. But turning her into a living dead zombie only added insult to injury, and Blackest Night was by far one of the most disgusting, troll-the-audience publicity stunts DC could have ever conceived. And any friendship she was forming with the reintroduced Kara Zor-El was thrown out the window.

Most of the characters who were killed off at that time have thankfully been revived/exonerated since (though Harbinger's status is still unclear as of this writing). But the editors wasted tons of time pulling those stunts in the first place, and cost a lot of readership who shouldn't have been alienated in the first place.