Cover to New Avengers #3. Art by David Finch. The Sentry is one of the strangest comic book superheroes to emerge in recent years. He was created by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee for the Marvel Comics Marvel Knights line.
The Sentry hoax
The Sentry was marketed with a hoax. Comic industry magazine Wizard reported that Marvel had discovered sketches by an unknown artist named Artie Rosen of a superhero created by Stan Lee immediately prior to the Fantastic Four. The Sentry miniseries was promoted as the first appearance of an unknown Stan Lee Silver Age hero. However, Marvel had made the whole thing up and Wizard had played along, for reasons revealed in the story.
The Sentry and the Marvel Universe
Cover to Sentry #2. Art by Jae Lee. The miniseries established Bob Reynolds, a borderline alcoholic married man with possible psychotic delusions, as the Sentry, a Superman-like hero who derived his powers from a special serum. The Sentry was an optimistic and socially accepted hero who stood in marked contrast to the mostly freakish nature of Marvel characters. He had connections to Mister Fantastic, Iron Man, the Hulk, Spider-Man and Professor X. However, his existence was retroactively erased by an unknown figure who tried to conceal the Sentry's identity even from himself. This was also the reason that Lee and Marvel had supposedly forgotten about the character.
It was revealed that the Sentry and his archenemy the Void required each other to exist, and as one grew more powerful, so did the other. The Sentry remembered that he was the one who had erased the world's memory of him and restarted the program that would do so, defeating the Void once again. The whole story can be seen as a meta-commentary on the darkness that overwhelmed superhero comics by the mid-80s, destroying the optimism and wit of the Silver Age.
At the end of the limited series, it seemed as if the Sentry would fade away into obscurity again.
The Sentry as an Avenger
However, in 2004, the Sentry was reintroduced by Brian Michael Bendis in the pages of New Avengers. In the first issue , Lawyers Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson with bodygaurd Luke Cage and S.H.I.E.L.D agent Jessica Drew travel to 'The Raft,' a super-maximum security annex to Rykers (not "Rikers" in Marvel) Island penitentiary designed to hold the Marvel Universe's worst supervillains. Here, Murdoch and Nelson are visiting the Sentry, who has been imprisoned for murdering his wife, in order to "find out what happened to him and his wife". Soon after their arrival the supervillain Electro stages a massive jailbreak, freeing almost ninety supervillains who then attack Murdoch, Nelson, Cage and Drew, along with the newly arrived Captain America and Spiderman. During the ensuing melee the group is contronted by the alien symbiote, Carnage. Foggy Nelson, thrown into the cell containing Robert Reynolds, attempts to convince the Sentry to help them. Without saying a word, the Sentry blasts through nine levels of the complex carrying Carnage into space, where he disperses the alien symbiote, possibly killing him.
Upcoming issues of New Avengers #s 7-9 will feature a Sentry story which might explain the gap between the end of The Sentry mini series and the current appearance of the Sentry. But, what the inclusion of the Sentry in the New Avengers line-up means in terms of future storylines (in regard to the events of The Sentry mini-series) remains to be seen.
In the wake of the Sentry's reappearance as an Avenger, copies of The Sentry #1 suddenly shot up in value in the collector's market.
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