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.