Nerdly Advice – Funeral Edition

Nerdly Advice – Funeral Edition

May 20

[The following post contains spoilers for the finale of Siege and the various one-shots and specials that spin out of it. If you have not read Siege #4 and wish to remain unspoiled, you might want to skip this one.]

Sometimes nerds have questions, and we do our best to answer them. Sometimes they’re about important things, but mostly they’re about the ridiculous curiosities of fandom. It’s kind of like Antiques Roadshow in the Batcave. Or something. We call it Nerdly Advice.

Today’s question comes from ‘CLOC’, who wants to know “Jeff, What’s the deal with the Sentry? I don’t know anything about him except that he did it with Rogue and probably Crystal, too, right?”

CLOC,

Nobody knows what the Sentry’s deal is. I doubt even Paul Jenkins does at this late date and he, along with Rick Veitch, created the Sentry.

He’s had numerous different origins on-panel, including one in which he’s the Old Testament God or some other bullshit, but the one that’s probably true is that he was a junkie who drank a megadose of Super Soldier Serum with some acid in it and then he became an agoraphobic, reality-altering murder machine with a psychotic split personality and a penchant for throwing things into the sun.

Yes, Bob. Yes you do.

I am sure that opinion varies about whether or not Sentry was ever a good and compelling character, but here are the facts. Jenkins and Jae Lee produced a critically acclaimed, award-winning miniseries about the character in 2000, and it was a haunting story about addiction and humanity seen through the lens of the Marvel Universe. It was kind of like Kurt Busiek’s epic Marvels, except with a junkie instead of a photojournalist as our POV character.  The Sentry represented the euphoric highs of substance abuse and his opposite number, The Void, was the hungry, all-consuming lows. It’s not a subtle metaphor, but it may have been the best work of Jenkins’s career, even surpassing his Inhumans series. At the end of the series, the world is made to forget The Sentry’s existence, and there’s a degree of closure to the tale. The Sentry was presented initially as a ‘lost’ Stan Lee character from the Silver Age – further proof that Stan Lee will gladly take credit for anything from the bagel I had this morning to a roadside fucking bomb.

That is, until Brian Michael Bendis showed up and decided that Sentry was going to be more fully integrated into the fabric of the shared universe of Marvel. And that the best way to accomplish that would be to make him absolutely bugfuck insane and terrifying oh my god you guys. Seriously, the first time we see him in New Avengers, he’s muttering into his homeless beard about how he’s murdered his wife (who isn’t dead) and the second time we see him, he flies Carnage into space and rips him in half. And then has another mental breakdown. And so it goes: the character’s brief history from there is rife with fits of mental instability and horrific violence, as well as downright messianic feats like reconstituting himself after being obliterated, in between scaring the piss out of everybody and sitting in his room and weeping.

Despite being attached to creators like Bendis, John Romita Jr. and Jeff Parker (whose Age of the Sentry miniseries is the best of the scattershot attempts to make the character fit into a cohesive shared world), the Sentry become more of a joke than he was a hero and more an unstable bomb than a character. Like Gretchen Weiner shouting ‘fetch’ out into the lonely darkness, the various creators responsible for the Sentry’s intrusion into Avengers history could simply never make him happen, no matter how many decibels they mustered.

And so they killed the Sentry; Thor threw him into the sun.

Because Bob Reynolds had exited for a little less than a decade after being spun into the Silver Age from whole gossamer cloth, staging a memorial for him rang hollow. Hell, they couldn’t even have a good funeral issue for the Wasp and Janet Van Dyne was one of the original Avengers. Sentry never had a chance. But, true to form, the creators responsible for the sendoff wove the character into important moments in basically every hero and heroine’s life retroactively; hence Bob Reynolds teaches Ben Grimm how to be a moral man and teaches Anna Marie Raven about the birds and the fucking bees – to convince people that he ever mattered to begin with.