Batman is not the only one who survived childhood trauma, a Green Lantern was forced to spill out a crippling burden of guilt that was making him anxious his whole life.
First eligibility to become a Green Lantern is to overcome your biggest fear. For members of Green Lantern Crops, losing the battle to their biggest fear can ruin everything. The World of Lanterns saw its great expansion with the introduction of Lanterns with different colors and the emotional spectrum of power they embody: hope, fear, rage, compassion, love, avarice, and will. From the start, emotions have been the biggest source of power for every DC comic character.
This statement rise a question in fans’ minds that how the Green Lantern overcome volatile emotions more specifically trauma? Talking a particular Lantern John Stewart, a childhood trauma left such a dark mark on his life that it left his body paralyzed and made him living his life in a wheelchair.
A Green Lantern issue by Judd Winick and penciled by Dale Eaglesham called “Prisoner of the Lantern” (2002), shows Stewart is forced to comfort a childhood trauma that he kept inside him for so many years. Many readers still don’t know that just like Batman Stewart also faced dark childhood trauma. The role he played in the destruction of the planet Xanshi and the ensuing collateral damage has become a character-defining moment, for example.
Kyle Rayner is midway through his run as the hero Ion at the time of publication, and the story starts with two characters together in an apartment that is owned by Stewart. Kyle reveals that he gets to know about a patch of energy from Parallax inadvertently blocking the nerve impulses on the vertebrae of his spine. In simpler words, he says that there is localized fear energy that is the reason behind his paralysis a cause which would otherwise go undetected by conventional medicine. However, Kyle gave all his best and removes the patch, as Stewart tries to stand his mind helps him to do this but his body was not ready to cooperate.
This incident forces Stewart to consult with his psychiatrist, Dr. David Nephew. In the beginning, Nephew was interested to know the reason behind his self-discipline. Stewart describes his kid version as a boy with a lack of focus and a boy who got in with wring crowd. He confronts that he stole his aunt Loretta’s car for a joy ride when he was just fifteen years old. That day Stewart crashed in another vehicle when a drunk truck driver ran a stop sign. As he tells it, the tongue-lashing he got from his aunt is what set him straight and motivated him to be such a high-achiever.
But there’s more to the story than even John realizes at this time. It turns out he wasn’t alone, his younger brother Damon was in the car as well, but, fortunately, he was also unharmed by the accident. It’s revealed the only bystander of the crash was Stewart’s puppy who was in the backseat of the car and killed. The guilt that he has inside him somewhere cut all his mind’s connection with his body. To fear himself from the trauma John has to spill out what happened on the day of the crash Dr. Nephew takes Stewart into a deep hypnotic state to relive the memories of that day, and only then is it revealed that it wasn’t a dog in the backseat, but his younger sister Rose.
This incident gave readers a rare glimpse of how trauma can make Earth’s most powerful protectors so vulnerable and weak.
