This article is about the Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee character created in 2000. For the Kree giant android, see Sentry (Kree).
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.
Quick Answers
How did Robert Reynolds become the Sentry in Marvel Comics?
What are the powers of Sentry, also known as Robert Reynolds, in the Marvel Universe?
What role did Department K and the United States' Operation: Rebirth play in the creation of Sentry?
How did the Super Soldier Serum contribute to the creation of Sentry in Marvel Comics?
What led to the division of Project: Sentry into nearly a thousand isolated sub-projects?
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
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. The Sentry's sidekick, Billy Turner, the Scout, had also been affected by this erasure.
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.
Sentry
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 bodyguard 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, Murdock 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 Murdock, Nelson, Cage and Drew, along with the newly arrived Captain America and Spider-Man. During the ensuing melee the group is confronted 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 rips the alien symbiote in half, possibly killing it (there appeared to be no body inside the symbiote).
Issues of New Avengers #s 7-10 revealed the true story behind Sentry's delusions and psychopathic tendencies. It was revealed that the Sentry has powerful psychic and mental powers holding his physical powers together. This fact was then exploited by the Mastermind, Jason Wyngarde, who was hired by a long-forgotten villain, the Crazed General. The Mastermind implanted a mental virus inside the Sentry's mind which gave birth to his delusions and eventual existence of the Void, which is actually his repressed persona. This also gave the Mastermind the ability to make him sense anything he wants to. The mental virus subsequently impared his ability to remember his old life and a solution he saw was to implant his memories into the comic writer Paul Jenkins, who then drew his comics.
Luckily for Reynolds, Emma Frost knew how the Mastermind's powers work and was able to cure him, paving way for his official inclusion to the Avengers and the installation (or appearance) of the Watchtower atop the Stark Tower.
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 unseen. A new 8-issue Sentry mini-series by Paul Jenkins and John Romita, Jr. was launched by Marvel in late September 2005, spinning out of events in New Avengers #s 7-10.
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Bendis recently mentioned some of the plans he had for the Sentry in an interview with comiXtreme. In response to the question, "What is the Sentry’s role on the team, is he going to be de-powered to fit the team, and also will we see The Void in New Avengers?" Bendis responded, "Yes, the Sentry’s role will be defined very clearly in the second arc of New Avengers. His powers will be defined, and The Void will make an appearance."
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.
Powers
The Sentry's powers are derived from a serum which causes his molecules to step an instant ahead of the current timeline. Though most of his powers and their limits are still unknown, he has displayed several abilities similarly possessed by DC's Superman. Such are super-strength, super-speed, invulnerability, and flight. Aside from those mentioned, he can also project energy fields, control light, and has vast psychic and mental forces mainly used for holding his physical powers together, though it is not yet mentioned whether the Sentry can use them the way Professor X and other psychics use theirs; the only psychic abilities he had displayed so far is implanting his memories inside Paul Jenkins' mind and calming the fury of the Hulk.
It may be theorized that the Sentry also has the ability to produce hard-light constructs similar to those of Dazzler's when it was revealed that the Void is a just an expression of his repressed persona, and thus his creation.
With Marvel dubbing The Sentry as the world's most powerful superhero, and with the serum causing a photosynthetic reaction to his body, completely altering his state of consciousness, it is nonetheless conceivable that Sentry's powers are limitless, and may even rival those of the Silver Surfer's and Phoenix's.
He has very similar powers to Gladiator and Hyperion, as they too were based on Superman.