The Sentry review

Initially presented as a lost Stan Lee character through planted Wizard articles and promotional materials, The Sentry is remarkable not only for being a clever and successful metafictional stunt, but for creating a compelling deconstruction of the Superman myth.

On the surface, the narrative was clean: Stan had created – along with fictional artist Artie Rosen, a sort of Kirby-adjacent creator whose “concept drawing” was used as a variant cover for the first issue of the 2000 series – a character before Fantastic Four was released in 1961. That golden Superman-type character was buried in piles of old material left around the Marvel offices, where writer Paul Jenkins “rediscovered” the character.

The resulting five-issue series, The Sentry, and the five one-shots featuring classic Marvel characters, pointedly avoided the Silver Age sensibilities that Lee and Rosen would have embraced. It’s a story distinctly of its age and pedigree. With art by the classically dark Jae Lee, the book spun out of a notoriously messy half-decade of Marvel Comics and aimed to start the new millennium with a powerful, distinctive new direction.

Jenkins, a British writer, leans into the style of the British deconstructionists of the 1980s, like Alan Moore. The lean is so pronounced that The Sentry shares a lot of DNA with Miracleman, Moore and company’s masterpiece fifteen years earlier. Like Miracleman, The Sentry features a superman of immense, godlike power; like Miracleman, that hero has forgotten his time as a superhero and slumped into a middling, unhappy middle age.

What makes The Sentry different is the way that it embraces a larger continuity: the gimmick is that the Sentry isn’t the only character to have forgotten. Utilizing Reed Richards and Doctor Strange, the book teases a mystery as to how a character of such power and significance might be erased from the whole of Marvel history. If the Sentry existed, then he existed alongside the heroes readers knew; he existed throughout the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Copper Age.

To hammer this forgotten history home, Jae Lee pulls off the wonderful trick of imitating illustration styles of the preceding decades, creating flashback panels that might have been drawn by Kirby, Sal Buscema, or Rob Liefeld; these flashbacks are adorned by Jenkins with dialogue and caption boxes that would fit the appropriate era. As the reader dives into the Sentry’s history, they are reading fragments of comics that do not exist.

The result is a largely astounding and successful effort, however closely it treads to the deconstructionist comics that preceded it. The initial miniseries is incredibly strong, and the mystery is focused and driven.

The narrative falls apart in the back half, a series of one-shots spotlighting the relationship Sentry had with heavy hitters like Spider-Man and Hulk. The trouble, here, lies in redundancy – each plays out with near-mirrored plot beats; the effect of a single issue might have better hammered home how the classic Marvel characters looked up to Sentry. Piled atop one another, even the superstar art of Bill Sienkiewicz or Mark Texiera struggles to hold attention.

The final reveal – that the world-destroying evil force that is The Void and the golden hero are one and the same – feels a little weak; the shock of the reveal is buried under the larger mystery of the Sentry’s erasure from history. Regardless, The Sentry and its one-shots paved the way for superheroing in the decade to come: interested not only in its roots but in the role of the superhero in a new millennium. It’s a landmark comic in effect, though it failed to cement its central figure: even now, the Sentry goes through his cycles of disappearance and erasure.

 Paved the way for superheroing in the decade to come.  Read More