In Defense Of… the Sentry
I like the Sentry.
WAIT WAIT- give me a moment here. I don’t like the New Avengers Sentry. I don’t like the fact he’s on a team and poorly thoughtout and kind of ignored despite having this big goddamned thing on to over Stark’s tower.
I liked the original miniseries a lot. I like the lie behind it. And I think the Sentry, at heart, encapsulates everything I love about Marvel and their style.
I’m gonna get it, aren’t I?
Let me explain: Robert ‘Bob’ Reynolds is a loser. Let’s face it, he’s no square-jawed, barrel-chested man of action. He’s an agoraphobe if I remember right, a suspected alcoholic that thinks he gets superpowers when he drinks. It just so happened he was right, thanks to a special serum. He was a middle aged man going to some of the world’s greatest heroes and saying ‘Hey, I know you and we’re really cool friends.’
He should be laughed out of the room. But it’s all true, he is a great hero, his dreams are reality. I know people who still live in their high school years and think back to when they were the Big Man on Campus who let themselves go as years went by, only thinking about the Good Ol’ Days.
Not only could he be completely delusional or the greatest hero ever known, but he’s also his own worse enemy. I hate overpowered characters with no serious drawbacks and this is probably the most poetic and probable drawback yet. You wanna be Superman? You want to be the greatest force for Good? Well, there’s an equal and oposite reaction to everything and the Sentry creates just as much Evil in the world as he does good just by being there. He’s his own worst enemy and, in a way, aren’t we all?
The end of his first miniseries had him realize all this, the fact that he might be insane, the fact he could never get a chance to be that hero he used to be without bringing about just as much destruction. The greatest power and the greatest amount of responcibility, Robert Reynolds has to forsake his heroic rights and be that middle aged loser in order to save the world. In a day and age where Peter Parker loses his sense of responciblity to his family and toes Tony’s party line for a better suit and a nice place to live, the idea that a man who has no life and no future could turn his back on glory and fame and purpose even to ensure he does the Right Thing(tm) and keep the Void from this world is just awesome in story and scope.
I like the Sentry. I like the ordinary man given extrodinary powers and abilities who has to struggle with being human first, and a hero second. I like seeing how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. I would have loved to see Bob show up in books as this lonely man looking up to the sky, watching the heroes overhead and knowing that could have been him again. I like my character’s flaws to be central to their everyday life. Why we don’t see more of the Sentry’s wife having to cope with her broken husband, I don’t know. Why he has to be this throwaway idea in the New Avengers that can be simply defeated by logic loops, I don’t know that either.
Paul Jenkins came back to sort of explain the Sentry in a second mini, and for the most part, I loved it. It was more of a character study than the first and, in his gut-wrenching origin, it was all hammered home when the Void tells him flat out ‘You could have been anyone’. Peter Parker, all Spider Totem BS aside, could have been anyone. Anyone can be a mutant. Any soldier could have been super, he just had to be at the test at the right time and really want it. There is nothing particularly special about a Marvel character for the most part, they are written with everyone in mind. And that’s why I will always be a Marvel fan. While I will never be a girl made of clay, or a billionare playboy or a lost alien, I could be a kid on a field trip.
I could go on and on about the mini, how John Romita Jr. came a long way to show us how off his rocker the Sentry was in simple facial tiks and stances, how the Sentry threw a part of himself into the sun to escape Bob’s inadequacies, how the Void’s last words were that he loved him and how much just a tiny well placed word bubble can speak volumes, but… I’m a sucker for Jenkins so much it would just come off as fangirling.
The next New Avengers has him in it, but not really. The Sentry, my The Sentry, forfitted his position to keep me safe and went back to being just a guy and that’s where I will keep him.
