{"id":23061,"date":"2024-10-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=23061"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:42:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:42:08","slug":"sentry-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/10\/09\/sentry-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Sentry 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here we join a really weird stunt, already in progress. Paul Jenkins had this idea for a character with a long history in the Marvel Universe that had been mysteriously erased. And at this time, no stunt was too broad, so Jemas & Quesada pushed that into the real world, selling the Sentry as a \u201clost\u201d Stan Lee creation who might just pre-date the FF. The backs of each issue would feature increasingly preposterous conversations between Joe Q and Stan Lee about this long-lost property to sell the idea, but it was all fake.The conversations included a bunch of paranoia about how this concept was hidden for a reason, that it was so dangerous it could destroy everything.  Marvel was really wild under Jemas\/Quesada, almost anything could happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This echoed the story itself, by Jenkins, Jae Lee and Jose Villarubia, which introduced Robert Reynolds, a regular-seeming guy living in the suburbs with his wife Lindy, who half remembers, half thinks he\u2019s hallucinating that he used to be the Sentry, \u201cThe Golden Guardian of Good.\u201d The Sentry\u2019s evil opposite number was the Void, a literal shadow of a man, and Bob knows in his heart that the Void has returned, and he\u2019ll have to become the Sentry one more to face him. But he also knows that\u2019s crazy. Through his comic book visions, we see the Sentry\u2019s origin, taking \u201cthe professor\u2019s secret serum,\u201d we see him fighting the Void, we see him team up with much of the Marvel U, and we see the professor whose serum he uses warning him that he\u2019s becoming too dependent on it, among other things. He keeps telling himself none of that can be real, even as he finds his old super serum in the basement and drinks it, even as the Void manifests in his dog. He\u2019s almost convinced he\u2019s just an alcoholic sneaking drinks as his wife accuses him when she finds him, until he flies away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He runs into Reed Richards, who was one of his closest friends and now doesn\u2019t remember him, because no one remembers the Sentry. Bob tells Reed he thinks it\u2019s a conspiracy, but he can\u2019t remember why. He tries to get Reed to remember attending Bob & Lindy\u2019s wedding, and when that doesn\u2019t work, says the word \u201cunicorn,\u201d which seems to make Reed almost shake whatever\u2019s keeping him from remembering as Bob flies away. Reed goes home and asks Sue if they ever went to a wedding with a unicorn, and then a statue of one appears in the room, on a shelf, and they both start to sort of remember the wedding. As Bob rides the subway, becoming more sure of who he is, Reed & Sue find a VHS tape marked \u201cwedding\u201d they don\u2019t remember, but when they put it in the VCR, it\u2019s Reed saying if they\u2019ve found this tape, they\u2019re as good as dead. Throughout, Bob\u2019s flashbacks to the Sentry\u2019s career are pastiched or outright copied from different artists as we move through time: Jack Kirby, John Byrne, Frank Miller, Rob Liefeld, someone appropriate to each decade of Marvel as we moved through the eras. And as he gets into issue 3, obviously, Spider-Man shows up, so we\u2019re doing this. But this issue begins with Bob finding Hulk, who remembers him immediately as his old friend, \u201cGolden Man.\u201d But meanwhile\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ominous! This series had great atmosphere, helped a lot by a Jee Lee who\u2019s very different from the last time we saw his art, but not yet the guy who has drawn 100 covers that look exactly the same. Here, he\u2019s pretty good! Back in the A plot, Bob is saying Hulk should have evolved by now, that something\u2019s wrong, but Hulk says Hulk is Hulk, which is very Hulk of him. Bob remarks that Hulk remembers him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He tells Hulk the Void is coming back, and Hulk is scared of \u201cShadow Man.\u201d He tells Hulk all they can do is wait for the Void to reveal himself, and that things will get worse before they get better. Quick cut to an extremely racist politician somewhere in Africa finding out that a village he was going to see has been quarantined due to something horrible happening that killed a lot of people and an elephant. Back in Manhattan, Reed is looking into Bob Reynolds, who is blurry on security footage, and who has the social security number of a dead man. Reed also confesses to his journal that he has somehow reacquired his childhood fear of the dark. This book is all about building mood, just describing it sucks, but hey, it\u2019s what I do. Elsewhere, as Bob stares at the city next to a gargoyle, he has a visitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rather ironically, while it\u2019s been easy to identify the artist all flashbacks in the series so far were copied from, I can\u2019t really place the Peter Parker. Doesn\u2019t much look like anybody, really. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And, like, what\u2019s going on here? The Spider-Man is copied from Erik Larsen\u2019s cover to ASM 343<\/a> (I had to close my eyes and think for a second, but I got it), but the Sentry looks more like a Gil Kane figure, but not a Gil Kane face. Like the whole point was to be able to go \u201cOh, Jack Kirby-style art means we\u2019re in the 60s,\u201d \u201cOh, this pastiche of Frank Miller\u2019s The Dark Knight Returns means it\u2019s 1986,\u201d etc. We get to Spider-Man and it stops making sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From there, we cut back to Reed, who\u2019s found some filing cabinets full of newspaper clippings about the Sentry and the Void, and then a voice behind him says, \u201cYes, he does exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dramatic! Next time, more Sentry, as more of the Marvel U gets pulled in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here we join a really weird stunt, already in progress. Paul Jenkins had this idea for a character with a long history in the Marvel Universe that had been mysteriously erased. And…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[49,288,59,72,1721,1960,1911,247,1959,2,1710,663],"class_list":["post-23061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-doctor-strange","tag-fantastic-four","tag-hulk","tag-human-torch","tag-jae-lee","tag-jose-villarubia","tag-paul-jenkins","tag-reed-richards","tag-sentry","tag-spider-man","tag-sue-storm","tag-the-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23062,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061\/revisions\/23062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}