A Medical Review of the Giffen/De Matteis Justice League

August 10th, 2004

Filed under: Medicine

In the Giffen/De Matteis Justice League, Guy Gardner’s personality changed from unpleasant to Mr. Sensitive after a bump on his head that knocked him unconscious.

Looking under the monitor desk in the Justice League cave for his ring, Guy instead encounters a mouse. Startled, he jerks up, striking the back of his head on the underside of the desk and knocking himself out. In the next issue, he’s humming Debbie Boone songs and reading an issue of Cosmopolitan. He remains this new sensitive character until another head injury restores his original personality.

Head injuries can certainly cause changes in personality. The brain is made up of different lobes and each lobe has several different functions. Among its duties, the frontal lobe controls personality. Therefore, a substantial frontal lobe injury can cause a significant change in personality.

Brain Anatomy

NOTES:

  1. Unlike Justice League, a change in personality due to a head injury is anything but light-hearted. It is caused by brain damage – damage that is nearly always permanent. Additionally, the new personality is almost always an unpleasant one. Changes in personality are not an on-and-off switch that can be reset by another head injury.
  2. Even though Guy struck the back of his head, he had to have injured his frontal lobes. This is consistent with a mechanism of injury known as contre coup. As the back of the head hits the counter, the brain keeps moving until it smashes against the inside of skull, damaging the back of the brain (the coup injury). The brain then rebounds inside the skull and moves forward, impacting the front of the skull and damaging the frontal lobes (the contre coup injury).

6 Responses to “ A Medical Review of the Giffen/De Matteis Justice League ”

  1. tomthedog
    August 10th, 2004 at 10:58 pm

    Now, come on. I know very well from Gilligan’s Island that one coconut to the noggin changes your personality, another coconut changes it back. Or gives you amnesia. That’s just cold hard science.

  2. matthew rossi
    August 11th, 2004 at 5:55 am

    Didn’t Batman knock Guy unconscious a few issues before the head injury that rendered him sensitive? I’ve always wondered if that was the more likely cause for his personality change, when I was reading the book, and before it melted down into pure silliness.

  3. David Lawson
    August 11th, 2004 at 1:56 pm

    The two could be related. Guy took his ring off because he thought he could take Batman in a straight up fight (stupid) and got knocked out cold for an issue or three. When he woke up, he went to get his ring which had dropped on the floor where the above-mentioned head injury took place.

  4. Scott
    August 11th, 2004 at 7:11 pm

    When Guy regained consciousness after his Batman-induced nap, he was still his normal “delightful” self: “That Bat-eared moron hit me! Just like him to nail me with a lucky punch! Well, we’ll see who — Wait a minute! Where’s my power ring? Remember handing it to Beetle, then that creep tossed it over — there!” (proceeds to look for ring, bangs head, etc. Wait a minute — when did he find his ring??).

    I discounted the Batman punch because Guy was still surly afterwards, though a punch like that (or actually hitting his head on the ground) could cause brain injury.

  5. zwit
    September 16th, 2004 at 8:33 am

    It was clearly a synergestic effect between the head injury and the power ring’s safety protocols. Yeah, that’s it. He sustained the head injury a fraction of a second before he got his hand on the ring, so it wasn’t able to prevent the damage, but it was able to repair it, except it went too far. Yeah, that sounds good.

  6. Jack Hare
    November 12th, 2008 at 2:39 am

    The head injury is a red herring. The secret, as yet unrevealed, is that Guy was abducted earlier by the same aliens that got Steve Dallas.

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