The Sentry was gonna be in this book with short hair, like on the issue 3 cover, but they decided the long hair was a good idea since he does look so much like a recolored Superman. That was fine for the original mini, but if you’re going to make him a real, ongoing character, maybe you don’t want such an obvious Superman clone. We open this month flashing back to the Illuminati meeting, and Tony wanting to ask them about the Sentry. He mentions how Reed sent Matt Murdock to the Raft to check on him, and Reed says he’s never heard of the Sentry or Bob Reynolds. Tony says he’d never heard of him, either, but he’s learned Bob asked SHIELD to lock him up because he killed his wife, even tho he didn’t. Reed is convinced to check his files, and finds 1223 entries about Bob. Professor X says someone’s been tampering with Reed’s mind. Then, back in in present day Connecticut, the Void arrives at the Reynolds home, with a lot of bad blur effect as the various heroes are thrown all over the place.
Over 2 pages, a video of Bob in the Sentry suit explains his basic premise. That no one remembers him including himself sometimes, that he is the Void, that he’s probably made a lot of messages like this for Reed, but it all slips away from him. He wonders if the Void is him punishing himself for something he’s done. He closes by saying if Bob is there with Reed watching this, he should do whatever Reed asks to fix it. After a big panel of the Void rampaging, Bob allows Emma into his mind.
Bendis would, himself, go on record as saying there were certain characters he just couldn’t write. An example he offered was Thor. Emma is one. The voice is just all wrong, her posh, haughty faux-Britishness gone.
Emma zeroes in on Bob’s encounter with the heroes and Paul Jenkins earlier in the day, noting the comic book connection, and then sifts through his memories, finding something blacked out that they’re not supposed to see. So she releases it, and they both see Bob’s fuzzy memory of being brainwashed by the X-Men villain Mastermind at the behest of a shadowy figure.
That would be… I think he was just called the General in the original series. Bob gets terrified, running away yelling “you had no right,” and then, in the real world, the Void starts yelling it, too, and we’re to be continued out. It’s interesting that, instead of just a negative version of the Sentry, the Void looks like a different monster every time he’s depicted in this series. Next time, we’ll see how this shakes out.