Sinestro was born on the planet Korugar in space sector 1417. His dedication to preserving order originally manifested in his previous career, an anthropologist specializing in reconstructions of ruins of long-dead civilizations. One day while he was on one such site, a Green Lantern named Prohl Gosgotha crashlanded into the site, injured and apparently dying. He quickly gave his ring to Sinestro, just in time for Sinestro, who barely even understood what the ring could do, to defend himself from the Lantern's pursuer: a Weaponer of Qward; however, Sinestro had to destroy the ruins he had spent loving care restoring in order to crush the Qwardian. Afterward, Gosgotha turned out to still be alive and asked for his ring back to keep him alive long enough to get help. Sinestro, knowing this would mean not being a Green Lantern himself, instead allowed him to die and took over his post, the Guardians unaware of his actions.[2]
In Green Lantern #45, his wife is shown for the first time in a flashback, and revealed to be the sister of Abin Sur.
His desire for order did well by him in the Corps, and initially led him to be considered one of the greatest Green Lanterns. As the years passed, he became more and more fixated upon not simply protecting his sector, but on preserving order in the society of his home planet no matter the cost. Eventually he concluded that the best way to accomplish this was to conquer Korugar and rule the planet as a dictator.
When Hal Jordan joined the Green Lantern Corps, Sinestro was assigned to be his instructor. Jordan was horrified at his new mentor's totalitarian methods, though Sinestro maintained that his iron-fisted rule was necessary to protect his people from alien forces. During his training, Jordan helped Sinestro repel an attempted invasion of Korugar by the alien warlords known as the Khunds. When Jordan called for help from the other Green Lanterns, Sinestro's dictatorship was exposed and he was forced to appear before the Guardians for punishment. Katma Tui, the leader of a Korugarian resistance movement who felt that Sinestro's "protection" kept her people from growing as a society through contact with other alien races, was recruited as his replacement in the Corps. Though Katma Tui eventually grew into one of the most respected Green Lanterns, she and the rest of Korugar initially resisted her appointment to the Corps; due to Sinestro's actions, Korugar had come to consider the symbol of the Green Lantern Corps an emblem of terror and oppression.
Punishment and villainy
For using the power of the Green Lantern to instill fear rather than combat it, the Guardians banished Sinestro to the antimatter universe, a counterpart to the "real" universe made up of "negative matter." Sinestro ended up on the Antimatter world of Qward, that universe's counterpart of the Guardians' homeworld Oa, which was ruled by a race of warriors and scientists known as the Weaponers of Qward, who bore a fierce hatred of the Guardians and all Green Lanterns. By exiling Sinestro to a world ruled by evil beings who specifically hated him as a Green Lantern, the Guardians hoped to humble him. Their attempt at punishment would be a major miscalculation, however. Sinestro believed himself to have been wronged by his former masters and now hated them just as much as the Weaponers did. Through their mutual hatred of the Guardians, Sinestro and the Weaponers became allies, with the Weaponers offering to help Sinestro gain revenge on the Guardians and the Corps.
Creating a yellow power ring for Sinestro to use, the Weaponers sent him back to the "positive matter" universe to seek his revenge. Sinestro quickly became the Green Lantern Corps' most powerful nemesis, partially due to a weakness in their power rings that prevented them from directly affecting the color yellow. Despite this, skilled Green Lanterns like Jordan, Sinestro's most hated enemy, always found ways to defeat him.
Before the Guardians took a leave of absence from their universe to attempt mating with their female counterparts, the Zamarons, they constructed an inescapable prison for Sinestro and thousands of others on Oa. However, Sinestro's cunning prevailed once again and he managed to free himself through the mental manipulation of the Mad God of Sector 3600. Now wielding nearly unlimited power, Sinestro murdered entire star systems until he was finally subdued by the Green Lantern Corps of Earth. Now guilty of multiple acts of genocide, Sinestro was put on trial again by the assembled membership of the Green Lantern Corps. Finding him guilty, they condemned him to death and executed him, but Sinestro managed to cheat death itself by sending his essence into the Central Power Battery, and shut it down. While in the Battery, he also made a startling discovery about the ancient weakness to yellow within the Green Lanterns' light.
Hal Jordan entered the Battery in a desperate attempt to restore the powers of his fellow Lanterns, and ultimately defeated Sinestro, whose spirit was condemned to remain trapped inside the Central Battery, powerless, for eternity. Yet Sinestro had earned an even greater personal victory as the so-called "Yellow Impurity" turned out to be a sentient entity known as Parallax, the living embodiment of fear. He also discovered the battery's power source was Parallax's green counterpart, Ion, the embodiment of willpower.[3] Thanks to Sinestro's actions, Parallax successfully infected Jordan's mind, leaving the so-called "greatest Green Lantern" vulnerable to fear for the first time in his life and setting up Sinestro's ultimate triumph.
Guy Gardner
Sinestro's original yellow ring was stolen by Guy Gardner from Oa's Crypt of the Green Lantern Corps. During the encounter, Sinestro possessed John Stewart to confront Guy, but his spirit was not strong enough to defeat Gardner's willpower.
As the yellow ring only "spoke" Sinestro's native language, Guy was unable to communicate with it, although it seemed to understand him to a degree.
Guy only wore the yellow ring for a short time before Hal Jordan, possessed by Parallax, destroyed it.
Parallax
In the meantime, the return of the Guardians resulted in the Corps being re-established. The newly restored Corps would be short-lived, however, thanks to the inadvertent efforts of the alien warlordMongul and Hank Henshaw, a cyborg who was at the time impersonating Superman. As part of their ultimately thwarted plot to transform Earth into a new version of Mongul's interstellar fortressWarworld and gain revenge on Superman, Mongul and the Cyborg used several nuclear devices to completely destroy Coast City, California, which was Hal Jordan's home, and everyone living in it. Driven mad with grief by the destruction of his city and the Guardians' apathy towards his plight, Jordan's previously indomitable willpower was shattered. Parallax was thus able to possess him completely and push him towards a homicidal rampage that wiped out most of the Guardians and left scores of Green Lanterns dead or maimed, as Parallax sought to absorb the Central Power Battery's energies into his being.
As a last-ditch effort to halt Jordan's rampage, the Guardians freed Sinestro from the Central Power Battery and sent him to stop Jordan. Though Jordan snapped Sinestro's neck after the battle, apparently killing him, it would later be revealed that what the Guardians had actually extracted from the Battery was a hard-light construct of Sinestro, created by Parallax and mentally puppeteered by the real Sinestro from within the Battery. Parallax promptly finished off the Green Lantern Corps by absorbing the Central Battery's energies into himself. With the Battery destroyed, Sinestro escaped and went into hiding as he watched Jordan become what he'd always hated Sinestro for being: a traitor and a murderer reviled by his friends and his allies. When the last surviving Guardian, Ganthet, gave the last remaining power ring to Kyle Rayner, Sinestro became obsessed with the young Earthman, realizing that despite Jordan's downfall, his plot to extinguish the Green Lanterns' light had failed.
Duplicate & Time-Travel
During the period when he was believed to be dead, Sinestro had two indirect encounters with other heroes. When dealing with an artificial intelligence based on the dead son of its creator, Wonder Woman faced a duplicate of Sinestro created by the A.I.'s use of a life-replicating material while watching videos of Sinestro's old battles, believing that he was just playing a computer game and unaware of the real-world damage that he was causing. Although he lacked Sinestro's tactical genius, his unrestrained use of Sinestro's power destroyed a bridge and a building, nearly suffocating Wonder Woman before he was defeated by the hero Champion (Really a disguised Hercules).[4]
On another occasion, Kyle Rayner was accidentally sent approximately a decade into the past, where he found himself witnessing a battle between Hal and Sinestro. Although he initially distracted Hal at a crucial moment, Kyle's ring's immunity to yellow proved vital in preventing Sinestro from executing the Guardians of the Universe. Kyle and Hal subsequently sabotaged his attempt to crash a planetoid into Oa by switching rings, Hal allowing Sinestro to throw him away before using Kyle's ring to destroy Sinestro's equipment while Kyle- Hal's ring protecting him from mortal injury- kept Sinestro occupied.[5] This encounter was apparently erased from history when Hal, Kyle, and a Parallax-possessed older Hal Jordan worked together to send Hal and Parallax back to their proper place in time to ensure that a Hal Jordan was present with powers to defeat the Sun-Eater, Hal returning to his own time just before Kyle's arrival changed history and defeating Sinestro on his own[6]
Return
Sinestro eventually revealed the charade of his 'death' when Kyle Rayner discovered the existence of Parallax and revealed it to Green Arrow and the Justice League. Nearly killing the two heroes, Sinestro was stopped by the newly resurrected Hal Jordan, who reclaimed his ring and was purged of Parallax's influence. The two fought to a draw, with Sinestro escaping to the antimatter universe when his ring was damaged by Hal during the fight.
Sinestro later appeared in the miniseries Villains United, where he captured Lady Quark for the Secret Society of Super-Villains. Sinestro had been a member of the group in the past. Here he plays a major role in the Society's massacre of the Freedom Fighters, who are investigating the meeting place of other villains, but walk into an ambush. Sinestro begins the fight by blowing a hole through the chest of the second Black Condor, killing him instantly. He then defeats Uncle Sam, leaving him for dead.