The Sentry Review (Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee)

Bob Reynolds is an ordinary chap with strange dreams of being a superhero called The Sentry. As those dreams turn out to be repressed memories, Bob realises he must make sure everyone else remembers who he is before his archenemy, The Void, returns.

The Sentry is both a failed experiment and a pointless character all rolled into one boring story. It’s extra-terrible for repeating the plodding structure of the first half in the second to no effect and the conclusion is underwhelming, rushed garbage. It’s really no surprise The Sentry never became a major Marvel character since his debut in this book that’s over 20 years old at this point.

It’s not really clear how and why Bob is remembering his secret past now or how, if The Sentry was as impactful a character on the world as he was, he could be so easily covered up in all the media he appeared in. The unsatisfying, lazy and convenient answer to the latter is Doctor Strange’s magic. Boo!

So Sentry spends the first half of the book going to the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spidey, the X-Men, and the Avengers to make them remember who he is, which gets dreary and repetitive really quickly - and then the second half is Sentry and the same characters remembering dull past adventures.

The entire book hinges upon the twist ending of The Void’s identity but if, like me, you already know it then the ending will have no impact on you. And the whole book is geared up for this seismic encounter that never really happens before Paul Jenkins throws in a deus ex machina to wrap it all up. It’s also feeble for being an origin comic as it never really explains how The Sentry and The Void came about. Paul Jenkins is the worst writer.

The one thing I sorta liked was the retro Marvel comics that feature The Sentry to make it seem to the reader that they too had forgotten the character even though he’d been around since the conception of Marvel Comics. The “classic” comics themselves are as boring as the modern comics but I liked the existence of them in how it cleverly includes the reader in the narrative conceit.

Everything about The Sentry sucks - this book most of all but definitely also the terrible character. It’s amusing how built up the character is in this book, like Marvel expected him to be this massive success that readers would want to know more about, and he’s appeared in only a handful of comics since then - that’s how much of a flop he was. This crap comic was, appropriately, very forgettable.