Marvel Sentry: Golden Age Years
Marvel Comics is a powerhouse in the comics industry. One of their more underrated characters has to be The Sentry, who first appeared on the scene during Marvel’s Golden Age. His story was one of tragedy and redemption, as he battled for justice while dealing with his own personal demons. Today, we will explore this character’s history and importance in both the Marvel Universe and comics as a whole.
The Sentry is the alter ego of Robert Reynolds, a high school student living in Queens. One day on his way to football practice he stops and beats up a bully who had been giving him grief for years. This inspires Bob to sew together some old curtains into a costume and fight crime as The Sentry! After meeting an enigmatic professor that tells him about how incredible he’ll be one day, Bob’s superhero career takes off with speed when he defeats Grey Gargoyle at Yankee Stadium during halftime!
He became friends with Spider-Man early on, but also met Spidey’s enemies such as Green Goblin. Later stories would see them teaming up against Doctor Doom! During the first appearance of most Marvel heroes, he was present during the first appearance and he was even friends with Marvel’s biggest and greenest outcast, Hulk.
Sentry married the love of his life, a girl named Lindy! Then the Sentry took Scout as his sidekick; but the arrival of the Void, a powerful monster whose greatest power is exploiting its enemy’s greatest fears quickly ended the Sentry’s love life. The Void almost killed Scout, drove Hulk into a rampage, and murdered over one million people in Manhattan. Discovering that the Void was derived from his own powers, Sentry teamed with Reed Richards and Doctor Strange to create a system that made Earth’s entire population forget all about him. With Sentry inactive and forgotten again (he had been when he was gone), the Void vanished.
Is Sentry a Hero or Villain
Sentry is a hero, so I’m going to take this opportunity to say something non-controversial and tell you that he’s one of my favorite Marvel characters. He has the power to shoot beams from his eyes that can destroy anything in their path. His only weakness? There are none because he doesn’t have any weaknesses! Sentry was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby back in 1958 when they were looking for a new superhero character. They came up with an idea of an ordinary man who gains powers from cosmic rays – like Superman. It just goes to show you that even though everything about the infamous ‘man’ in tights sounds pretty cool, sometimes it takes a little more than radioactive spiders to get the job done!
How Strong Is Marvel Sentry / The Void
Sentry’s powers are not fully known, but he is said to be one of the strongest superheroes on Earth. He has been compared to Superman and The Hulk for his strength and invulnerability. His powers stem from the cosmic energy that fuels his being, giving him superhuman strength and virtually limitless stamina. He’s also been shown to have abilities like flight, intangibility, force field projection, and more!
The Sentry’s power lies within two different beings: Robert Reynolds (the human) and the Void (a dark side of himself). The Void often tries to take control of the body but every time he does so Robert Reynolds fights back. He can be oblivious and appear mentally unstable at times, but he always finds a way to save people or make sure they don’t get hurt. Except when the Void is in control! When the Void is in control, the opposite of saving people from harm happens, people get hurt, or worse, die!
The Void is a pretty interesting character as well. The original comics say that The Void can do anything and everything. It’s just as powerful as Eternity (the universe), which sounds like an exaggeration but has been confirmed by Marvel canon. In fact, it even absorbed Eternity for some time before being defeated by Adam Warlock in the past! So what are The Void’s true powers and abilities? We’ll never know until Marvel decides to reveal them!
Who Killed Sentry
Like many of our beloved comic book heroes that we love, we know that death isn’t final when it comes to Marvel characters! In fact, they usually come back slightly differently than before. Sentry was killed the first time by Morgana Le Fay in Dark Avengers #2. The Molecule Man later kills Sentry a second time when he states that they could have been friends in Dark Avengers #11. More recently, however, Sentry was again killed by the crazy-powerful, rampaging, symbiote-god himself Knull! Ironically, Sentry was killed in the same way that he killed Ares, the god of war in Marvel’s Siege! Knull literally ripped the Sentry in half! As in his body was torn into separate pieces!
Is Sentry Stronger than Thanos
Sentry is extremely powerful but how does he stack up against Thanos? Sentry’s powers include flight, superhuman strength, great durability to injury, and magic. Sentry has done some tremendous things that would require unmeasurable feats of strength: such as rip the mighty Ares to pieces! He has torn Morgan Le Fay’s head clean off her body and smirked about it afterward! He has gone toe-to-toe with Hulk when he was arguably at his absolute strongest. They fought to a standstill(how insane is that?)! The Sentry with Void at the helm has even put Molecule Man in his place! Yes! Molecule Man. The same Molecule Man who turned Dr. Doom into God Doom in Secret Wars. The same man that can manipulate molecules and change the very fabric of reality in front of your eyes and even cause you to disappear on an atomic level! Speaking of the Void, we can’t exclude the Void when talking about Sentry vs Thanos.
Thanos on the other hand has some powerful tricks up his sleeve! His three main powers are superhuman strength, psychic abilities, and immortality (his creepy obsession with Lady Death). Thanos has single-handedly conquered worlds by killing everyone and everything in his path. He has wielded the Infinity Gauntlet, used it to its fullest extent, and survived! How about that time that Thanos snapped his fingers with the gauntlet and eliminated half of the universe?!! The Mad Titan even found a way to defeat Adam Warlock. There is one thing that always perplexes me though, is after all of his powerful feats over decades of comics that he had his heart ripped out by Drax the Destroyer in Annihilation! This is a moment alone that makes me question his ability to take down The Sentry / Void even if he wielded the gauntlet.
So who wins? I think the winner of this battle goes to Sentry, because of the Void! The Void’s strength has never been pushed to its limits and is seemingly unmeasurable. If it takes someone as powerful as Knull to kill the Sentry then Thanos might have met his match! That’s my opinion and I am sticking with it 🙂 This isn’t even considering Death Seed Sentry! That is a topic for another post but enjoy the image.
Is Sentry a ripoff of Superman
The question most everyone talks about when the Sentry comes up in conversation. How would the Sentry fare in a battle against the Man of Steel! Well, let’s see! The Sentry has the power to fly, super strength, and invulnerability. He also has an amazing ability called “Sentry Sight” to see anything in the world that he wants. Sounds vaguely familiar, right? The Sentry’s abilities are almost identical to Superman’s! Just you wait, there’s more! The Sentry wears an “S”, he was a reporter at one time, he also has solar-based powers, he has his own “Fortress of Solitude” called “the Watchtower”, and they both had a nemesis highly intelligent like Brainiac named Cranio!
So you might be thinking, what makes Sentry unique? Many things separate Superman and Sentry, such as psionic abilities, teleportation, matter manipulation, reality-warping capabilities, and resurrecting powers to name a few. Sentry also has an evil alter-ego named the Void that’s even more powerful than his counterpart and feeds on fear and intimidation!
Their origins are vastly different as well. Superman is an alien from the planet Krypton. In an attempt to save their son from death, they sent Kal-El out in a shuttle to Earth, which Superman’s father Jor-El hand-picked because of its sun. Superman’s Kryptonian physiology in combination with the Earth’s sun makes him immeasurably powerful! The shuttle crash lands on Earth and we all know the rest of the story.
Sentry, on the other hand, Robert “Bob” Reynolds was a schizophrenic junkie who broke into a warehouse to steal drugs and wound up injecting a serum that turned him into the Sentry. That serum also awakened his schizophrenic counterpart, the Void, whom Bob greatly feared because of how powerful the Void is and Bob struggles to have any control of himself when the Void is awakened.
So the Sentry isn’t even close to measuring up to the Eagle scout, symbol for justice and morality that Supes has been known to us all, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it makes the stories have a little more mystery because you never knew which version of Bob you were going to get! I will give you an example. During the events of World War Hulk, Banner was on a rampage taking revenge on everyone on Earth that he felt abandoned him, and Ironman had to convince Bob to not be afraid of his own shadow and to go be a big boy and stop the Hulk from destroying everything! After what seemed a long time, Bob finally mustered up the courage and fought the Hulk to a standstill. The Sentry has always reminded me of Bill Murray’s character, Bob in the awesome film “What about Bob?”!
I feel that I have to mention my main beef with Marvel’s Sentry. It’s not exactly what you would think either. Many would probably think that my beef is that the Sentry is far too powerful. While that may be true and is one of the issues I have with the character. I think that his main weakness, his mental instability, is sort of integral to the character like Superman’s weakness to kryptonite is in that it can be used against him at any time and at any moment to make for interesting plot points. I do find that the Sentry’s weakness is more interesting than Superman’s and could make for better stories. A good example is what we see Norman Osborn do during the Dark Reign arc. Norman controlled the Sentry to do his bidding by manipulating him and taking full advantage of his mental weaknesses. What I don’t like, however, is how the Sentry has been used in stories over the years. Due to the Sentry being so incredibly powerful, he is almost always used as a sic’ em boy kind of character! Think about that. Norman Osborn would sic’ him on anyone who opposed him in Dark Reign! In World War Hulk, Tony Stark convinced him to rescue the Avengers by sic’ing him on Hulk. When the Sentry was recently killed by Knull in King in Black. Cap called for Sentry to come and save them, only for Sentry to be ripped to shreds, literally. It’s a pattern that is sort of annoying, but then when you see the crazy feat of strength that the Sentry pulls off, it’s satisfying as the reader, and you sort of forget about his uselessness up until that moment! Ultimately though, the Sentry will never be on Superman’s level, in my opinion. Many factors come into play besides sheer strength.
Conclusion:
I hope this article has been helpful and given you a new appreciation for the Sentry. Bob Reynolds has shown us many incredible feats of strength and power over the years! It can be rather difficult to decide if Sentry is a hero or villain. I think he is both, but the main question we should ask ourselves when considering his morality is “What kind of world would exist without him?” The answer could go either way and that’s what makes it so hard for us to classify him as anything other than morally ambiguous. When you really delve into who this Golden Age character was supposed to be in contrast with how Marvel developed him through time, there are many similarities between Sentry and Superman, there are also massive differences between them as we’ve covered already! Though they’re different enough that people shouldn’t call them ripoffs outright (to avoid copyright infringement), the two characters have some striking resemblances which can to some seem like the Sentry has nothing going for him as a character and that he is just a Marvel version of the Man of Steel, but I would argue that in some ways, the Sentry is a bit more interesting and has a mystery to him that Superman lacks. This is because of The Sentry’s origin story, his mental instability, and the all-powerful Void!