November 1959: The Destroyer Within

“Are you sure that what you wish is what you want?” asks Cinderella’s mother/tree in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

As a science-fictional variation on the Aladdin theme, the Silver Age Green Lantern was wish fulfillment with a vengeance. But wishes can be scary things, something writer John Broome understood and explored in more than one story.

“The first superheroes, of course, are the parents themselves,” observed children’s television host Fred Rogers. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the human personality in which we believe that we ourselves are omnipotent, and that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we have to help children gently along the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent … Because even though children would love to think that they could take on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to they to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they think will, indeed, happen.”

The idea that the unconscious mind could make such powers immensely dangerous was the premise of the film Forbidden Planet, and tripped up Green Lantern more than once. Hal Jordan’s errant wish created a giant monster (The Leap Year Menace, Green Lantern 3) and his dream turned his mechanic pal into a seagull (Wings of Destiny, Green Lantern 7, July-Aug. 1961 ).

And in The Invisible Destroyer (Showcase 23, Nov-Dec. 1959), the Emerald Crusader confronts an elusive caped super villain sprung from the unconscious mind of scientist Dr. Phillips. This energy-projecting tulpa, which feeds on radiation, plans to obliterate Coast City in a nuclear detonation. Luckily for Green Lantern, his wish-fulfilling ring can create anything, including “anti-energy.”

“Green Lantern's powers were unusual in that they could explore the inner workings of the human mind,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Many stories center on the ring's exteriorizing people's thoughts, giving them bodily shape outside a person's mind.”