Is there ever a right time to introduce into your superhero universe a psychologically unstable god-being with the potential to sneeze a continent off the map? It is probably not when – 17 years in – you are being accused of having lost half your audience to superhero fatigue. But that’s exactly what Marvel is doing this weekend as Thunderbolts* brings us Sentry, quite possibly the freakiest superhero to ever grace the comic book publisher’s hallowed pages. You thought Rocket Raccoon was weird and unhinged? Reckon Moon Knight is a bit of a handful? This guy makes them look like well-adjusted professionals with decent pensions.
Sentry first appeared in 2000 in The Sentry miniseries which offered a sort of meta-commentary on superhero mythology; the character was initially presented as a forgotten Silver Age icon, retconned into Marvel history via an elaborate in-universe memory wipe that made everyone forget he existed – including himself. A glowing, golden powerhouse with the “power of a million exploding suns” he suffers from crippling anxiety, addiction, and the inconvenient tendency to transform into a malevolent entity known as the Void, a living embodiment of all his worst fears and impulses. Imagine Superman, if he cried after every rescue, kept forgetting he had a dog, and occasionally blacked out and levelled entire cities.
In Thunderbolts*, he’s initially known as Bob, a dishevelled, twitchy presence who, soon enough, finds himself plunged into the middle of Marvel’s latest motley crew of antiheroes, reformed villains and government-sanctioned liabilities. Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that Sentry may end up playing a far larger role in the next phase of Marvel’s cinematic sprawl than any of his teammates, if only because he has more raw power in the tip of his fingernail than the rest of them do in their combined emotional baggage.
At a time when Disney would probably pay good money to stick the entire multiverse in a box and relaunch with just Iron Man and a really good trailer, Marvel has chosen instead to hand us a deity-level eccentric with apocalypse issues. For that, you have to give the studio credit, even if it’s a bit like a tightrope walker setting the rope on fire just as the insurance team shows up with a clipboard.
The real question here is how this is going to pan out long-term, though the smart money is on Sentry being depowered just enough to ensure he doesn’t completely overwhelm the narrative of every Marvel episode he appears in. This has happened in the comics: in World War Hulk, the superhero’s battle with the not-so-jolly green giant was so intense that Sentry ended up reverting to his frail human form; in King in Black, he swooped in like a golden deus ex machina, only to be torn in half mid-monologue by Knull, a symbiote god with the vibe of a heavy metal album cover. To add insult to evisceration, the Void (Sentry’s destructive dark side) was absorbed into Knull’s own symbiote arsenal.
Will Sentry end up playing a huge part in the twin Avengers movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars, now due in 2026 and 2027? Could it even be he who decides to rip all our superheroes from their own realities and send them to Battleworld in the latter – a role originally taken in the comics by the Beyonder, and later by Doctor Doom? The superhero otherwise known as Bob Reynolds certainly has the power to shape Marvel’s reality in his own image if he really wants to.
