Marvel 2005 Week has presented me with a challenge unlike any other I've ever faced. Namely:

Why is this one so difficult? Well, during my Marvel Weeks, I've never had to cover a story quite like this one...which is 21 pages of people just standing around talking. And of those pages, 7 are of people having extended conversations in an all-white space. Take a look at a couple of full-page scans:


Seriously, that's it, guys. The entire issue is just that.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad story. But, doing that thing I do, how exactly can I do panel excerpts and synopsis for a comic story that is essentially one long "My Dinner With Andre" done to super-hero psychobabble? Any panel I excerpt becomes pretty out of context, and hey, the entire issue synopsis is literally, "Emma Frost talks the Sentry back to sanity, and he joins the Avengers," so I'm already done before I start.

Well, I'll muddle through somehow. Who was responsible for this comic, anyway?

Now, this isn't going to be one of my trademarked anti-Bendis screeds. At this point, he hadn't succumbed to his "everybody banters ceaselessly in the same voice" phase. And this is a good story...but I question whether it was a good story for this magazine at this time.

By the way, props to Steve McNiven. Given the script requirement "Show people sitting around in someone's all-white subconscuious just talking for page after page," he does a yeoman's job of not letting it get as visually boring as the concept sounds. The choreography of the characters, the way he keeps the "camera" moving without going nuts with it, all make it an eminently readable issue.

Now, as to the Sentry...

Let's just stipulate that most people find the Sentry a generally terrible concept. I myself found it a decent enough concept for a one-off, but the insistence on making him a real, regular part of the Marvel Universe baffling.

Especially given this context: we're in the first half-year of a brand new team of Avengers, characters with diverse and conflicting personalities, and we're unclear on how they'll mesh together. And instead of putting focus on those characters, or on team-building, that's when Bendis decides to do a 4-part Sentry retcon/origin story, in which virtually none of the "New" Avengers have a single thing to do?? In this particular issue, Spider-Man has one word of dialogue, and Spider-Woman has 2 three-word sentences, while Luke Cage and Wolverine don't utter so much as a single syllable. 80% of the dialogue, and the big save, goes to someone who's not even on the team, Emma Frost!! All I'm saying is, that's a funny way to establish a new team.

Another reason to question why there was such a hurry to do this story is the fact that Sentry did virtually nothing in the pages of the Avengers for the next few years. Seriously...go back and look for any significant impact Sentry had on any Avengers story before Dark Reign. Even when he was in The Mighty Avengers, Sentry was used just like DC uses J'onn J'onzz--he flies in and the bad guy neutralizes him quickly so we can understand what a bad-ass the villain is. (Plus, of course, there's the "ridiculously overpowered" problem, because why would the Avengers have a problem fighting a bunch of ninjas and take three issues to wrap it up when Sentry could mop them up in three milliseconds? So they usually left him behind.) So I'm not sure what the hurry was (unless the wanted Sentry back in action in time for the new Paul Jenkins mini-series to start...). This story could have waited, and instead Bendis spent 4 issues essentially ignoring the Avengers at a time he should have been focusing on them.

But what we've got is what we've got, so on with the 20-page dangling conversation. While the combined forces of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and anybody else who happens to be hanging around tackle the Void, Bob Reynolds has retreated into his own subconscious.

In a bit of meta-self-referentiality, comic writer and Sentry creator Paul Jenkins appears in these issues as comic writer Paul Jenkins, who has unknowingly been telepathically receiving info from the Sentry in order to write the Sentry comic book. Damn, Grant Morrison doesn't get this meta...anyway, he's hanging with Bob's wife, Lindy, when he bores her to death...


Just kidding. That's when Emma Frost pulls Lindy's mind into Bob's subconscious, too, and no doubt left a hell her with a hell of a bruise from that face plant. Thanks, Emma.

So, understanding that I'm leaving out an awful lot here, we get some exposition:


Then a double-page spread of the fight that we don't actually get to see any of...

Then it's back to Whitesville:

We get a flashback to Lindy and Bob's meet-cute...well, third-date-cute...

...which is enough to stir Bob's subconscious, so the Void freezes--thus ending any hope of any action in this issue:

Then it's on with more conversations...brought to you by the color white!!


And here we see that Bendis is completely retconning the Sentry already. In the original mini-series, Reed and Doctor Strange and the Sentry willingly brainwashed everybody in the world, including themselves, to prevent the Void from escaping and destroying everything. Now, it was one of the Sentry's enemies, The General, who hired the mutant Mastermind to plant a "psychic virus" that would cause Sentry's vast psychic powers to unconsciously brainwash everyone on Earth into forgetting him.

(Someone, however, didn't get that memo, because in flashbacks during OMIT, Reed and Doctor Strange remembered what they had done for the Sentry and used that as their basis for the "make everyone forget Peter Parker is Spider-Man whatsis.")

Anyway, back to the conversation:


So...it would be wrong to put everybody's mind to the way it was before?? Because even if you were writing a wrong, doing it on purpose is bad...? And no one will remember the Sentry's past?? (But it was OK to hijack Lindy's mind into Bob's subconscious without permission??)

Question: if Bendis didn't like Sentry's origin, and didn't like the explanations from the mini-series, and didn't want to use the character's past...why the need to use that character at all?? He couldn't find someone else, or create a new character, to be the repository for the Angel of Death?? Just askin'...

Anyway, it's time to resolve this talk-fest:


And then, we learn that Bob Reynolds' situation was like constipation!



Awww, a happy ending!!

Plus--free architectural add-ons!!

Then, the Illuminati have a serious meeting:



SPOILER ALERT: He won't. Tony Stark fraks up again!

Well, I guess that wasn't so tough after all. And look--Bendis can write an entire issue of literally nothing but talking, without breaking out the "funny" constant quipping and bickering. Whatever happened to that guy?

BONUS: Coolest Halloween costume ever:

If this was in adult size, I would TOTALLY wear this!!

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of hastily-thrown-together assemblages of characters who make you go "huh?", there's this:

I enjoyed Kirkman's romp through the attic of the Marvel Universe. Both Marvel and DC really need mags like this, I would say: comics that routinely rummage through oddball pairings of characters and have fun. The Batman: Brave And The Bold show is like that. Brave & The Bold the comic is sort of like that (except that JMS doesn't do fun stories there, and B&TB is apparently coming out quarterly now, if that).

And I understand why, from an economic standpoint, editorial would insist that you have one popular anchor character, who can sell the book.

But come on...when you can have an issue like this...

...which features Daredevil and Luke Cage teaming up to fight the Stilt-Man, as well as Sleepwalker stopping Black Cat during a burglary, and cameoes by the Punisher, Blade and Sunfire--well, why can't we have more?

The Big Two need to release more writers to go crazy frolicking through the vast, vast, vast supply of un- or underused characters. You guys have entire Universes at your disposal--USE THEM!!

OK, so just about everybody hated the Sentry, at least as applied by Marvel--the hero who never really existed, but was jammed like a square peg into the round hole of Marvel's continuity.

Yeah, the idea of a long-lost Stan Lee character was vaguely clever. But the clumsy execution--he was Hulk's best friend!! He was Reed's best friend!! He taught Tony Stark to stop drinking!!--and Marvel's refusal to let the concept remain a cute one-off mini-series basically led to large chunks of fandom really, really really despising the character.

Well, he's dead now (for awhile, at least). So what are we gonna do for Silver Age character-insertion based retcons?

Well, I've got an answer. Instead of a fictional "lost Stan Lee character," how about an actual lost Roy Thomas character?!?

Marvel Super-Heroes was a giant-sized anthology title--every issue featured a full-length original lead story (Captain Marvel, Doctor Doom, Black Knight) and a bunch of reprints in the back. On the last page of issue #20 (1969), we had the following house ad:

Sounds exciting, right? Too bad it never happened. Starting with that next issue, Marvel Super-Heroes went all-reprint. So no Starhawk story, no "mind-bending new concept," no one "blasting his way across two centuries."

Well, that happens. But the odd thing? Even though the story was done, it was never published anywhere. A Roy Thomas script with a (possibly) exciting new character, art by Dan Adkins, even the cover was done:

I'll let other, smarter websites do the detective work here. Apparently somebody at Marvel felt this first story didn't work, and they didn't want to have the character make his debut in a bad light, and so they pulled it to re-draw and re-write it. But that never seems to have happened.

Once again going to a better blog, Rip Jagger's Dojo presents several pages from the unpublished story...go take a look!

So...we have an actual honest-to-gosh "long-lost character" from one of Marvel's early giants, just waiting to have someone revive him (although, obviously, he might need a name change). Here's someone Marvel can go back and retcon into old stories, and he ACTUALLY existed (sort of).

Folks, hop on board the bandwagon, write letters to Joe Quesada, flood the message boards, and let's make Starhawk into the Sentry for the second decade of the 21st century!!

(And this time, make him suck less...)

For this and all posts today, SPOILER ALERT for Siege and the 95 Avengers titles released Wednesday...SPOILERS start after the Avengers logo...



As an epilogue to Civil War, Marvel gave us Civil War: Front Line #11, written by Paul Jenkins. And it was the worst comic book of all time. Cap was wrong because he didn't have a MySpace account. Ye gods.

Well, lightning couldn't strike twice, could it??

Well, yeah, it could. And did.

In all fairness, Sentry: Fallen Sun #1 is nowhere near as bad as CW:FL #11. Nothing could be.

And, since Jenkins created the Sentry, it's perhaps fitting that he gets to write the coda to the Sentry's troubled life.

But what does he give us? A tone deaf, self-aggrandizing exercise in Mary Sueism that belongs on a fanfic site.

Now, if Jenkins wants to ignore all the retcons that Bendis introduced to the Sentry, I suppose that's his right. I can't claim that the Sentry was made in any way a better character by being made into a drug addict/thief who became repository for the Angel Of Death and serving as an easily controlled lapdog for Norman Osborn.

But then again, this book has a banner at the top billing it as Siege: Epilogue. So you'd think that some editor or such would try to have Jenkins at least give lip service to the events of Siege, right?

Wrong. The events of Siege aren't mentioned at all. Reed Richards off-handedly mentions that Thor "had no choice." He couldn't even say that Thor killed the Sentry. And that's it. There is zero mention that Sentry ripped Ares in half, that he killed Loki, that he destroyed Asgard, that he tried to kill all of the Avengers, that he had become a docile servant of evil. Hell, the vast majority of the people at the graveside service weren't even involved in Siege.

So really, if Paul Jenkins is going to pretend that the events of Siege never happened, what's the point of this exercise? What's the point of branding it part of Siege? What's the point of eulogizing this "fallen sun" if we're not even going to mention the circumstances of his fall and death??

The point is Mary Sueism. As our heroes give tribute to Sentry, Paul Jenkins tells us that the hero he created enabled Tony Stark to get over his alcoholism. That the hero he created was a "better man" than Ben Grimm, who taught the Thing how to be a true hero. That the hero he created enabled Daredevil to survive his "difficult times." That the hero he created was the only one who had been able to touch Rogue, and had been her lover (despite the fact that he had to have been married at that time...). Reed declares that Sentry's "soul burns brighter than others," and that he'll never be able to see the rising sun without thinking of the hero Jenkins created.

Seriously. All that and more is in this issue. Despite everything that happened in the past 5 years under Bendis, the Sentry was the bestest hero ever, who made everyone better, who solved everyone's problem, was the lover of the "unattainable" woman, and was apparently perfection incarnate. Jenkins continues to pound that his creation was better and nobler than everyone else.

You know, maybe that kind of worked, back when the Sentry was a one-off, a somewhat better done version of DC's Triumph. But as a final take on a fallen hero who did some serious damned evil, it's kind of sad and pathetic. Once Sentry became Marvel's Irredeemable, you can't go back to day one--but Jenkins tries to, with a straight face, and without any irony. It's bad when DC does it with Captain Atom and Hal Jordan, and it's bad when Marvel does it--but made worse by his goofy insistence that his character was the bestest ever in the marvel Universe. It's fanfic, and deluded fanfic at that.

Still, it's better than Civil War: Front Line #11.

For this and all posts today, SPOILER ALERT for Siege and the 95 Avengers titles released Wednesday...SPOILERS start after the Avengers logo...



From the recap page in New Avengers Finale #1, describing the events of The Siege:

"Many heroes lost their lives?" "Many heroes?"

Pray tell, who??

Ares?? He was willingly a member of the Dark Avengers, willing to kill any hero Osborn pointed him at. He rebelled against Osborn not because Storming Norman was a bad guy, but because Norman tricked him into attacking Asgard. Hero? Hardly.

Loki?? As if. He deliberately precipitated all of these events. Even if you buy that he repented (and that completely contradicts what we were told in the Siege: Loki one-shot), he's hardly a hero. Any deaths that occurred, he's ultimately responsible for.

Sentry?!? The mad attack dog who blindly followed Norman, and killed Ares and Loki and brought down Asgard? If they were amongst the "many heroes" who died, Sentry obviously can't be. He was no Hal Jordan/Parallax, saving the Earth with a grand sacrifice. He smashed up everything, and died.

Who else died during Siege? Despite the grisly death of Ares, it was a relatively bloodless affair. Heck, that was one of the stories weaknesses--no one was ever in serious jeopardy, and the heroes barely worked up a sweat. No one had skin in the game, as it were.

I know, I know, the recap page was probably written by some intern. But it really annoys me to see Marvel try and puff up the importance of this story by pretending there was some great sacrifice or such. Many heroes? Hell, more heroes died in the Titans: Villains For Hire one-shot this week. Hey, Marvel--if you don't have the wherewithal to actually kill your heroes, don't try to claim the street cred, OK?

Well, well, well.

After months (and months) of studiously avoiding the issue of exactly what the frell happened at the end of "One More Day," some info has finally started to trickle out.

First, in the freebie Marvel: Your Universe Saga (available free this week at Marvel Digital Comics, if your missed it at your local shop), which recaps the last few years of Marvel continuity, we get this gem:

Using his vast powers, Mephisto saved Aunt May's life--at the cost of Peter and Mary Jane's marriage, which the demon erased from history. Unaware of what he has lost, Spider-Man continues his adventures.

Now, one would hope Marvel wouldn't print that without it being kind of official. So it wasn't some amnesia spell--Mephisto actually rewrote history, and Peter Parker is unaware of it.

Which is interestingwhen we consider the other precept they laid down back in the first issue of Brand New Day: ""Absolutely no one knows that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. Not Daredevil, not the Avengers, not anyone." At the time, I wondered exactly how that would play out with characters who HAD to know Spidey's identity, such as Venom or Norman Osborn (unless gazillions of stories were wipe out of continuity). This made the situation sound more like a mind-wipe than an actual historical change. But now Marvel says nope, it's a historical change.

Which brings us to Amazing Spider-Man #569, where Norman Osborn is confronting Peter Parker (click to make it larger if you can't read it):

"Everything WE did?"

Second thing to note: Venom can sense old host Eddie Brock from blocks away, but can't sense that Parker was a former host when they're in the same room. And he remembers that he was bonded with Spider-Man, but not Parker.

Third thing, when Spider-Man confronts Osborn:

"This time, you have no idea who I am."

So, assuming everyone's been playing fair with us, (including the editorial staff in their "official" pronouncements):

Peter doesn't know about the deal with Mephisto, which actually altered the timeline (so this speculation would be wrong).
Osborn used to know who Spider-Man was, but doesn't anymore (so past stories DID happen, Peter remembers, others don't, at least not the revealing parts).
Everything "we" did is still "up and running." (so the reason for the lack of memories is due to some specific steps Peter and ? took)

So Mephisto changed history, but within that new history, Peter and someone did something to erase memories of Spider-Man's secret ID.

Who? Could be Professor X...he's got the mojo to wipe out that many memories. But a Spider-Man connection? And could he effect an alien symbiote like Venom?

Could be Doctor Strange. He's got the mojo, at least from time to time. And he was hangin' with Webhead, during the "New Avengers on the run" days.

But what about the Sentry? He's pulled this "everybody forget about me" shtick twice now, with his awesomely undefined powers and his ultra-super-computer CLOC (and with help from Dr. Strange the second time). He and Spidey were New Avengers together, and Avengers HQ was the Sentry's Watchtower.

So what if, after Peter reveals his identity publicly (but before he splits the official Avengers), he has second thoughts, and gets Sentry to help him undo that with his awesome memory-eras-o-vision thingie? Or, after he splits, he sneaks back in, and gets the Sentry to help him anyway (or someone else..."we"...Doc Strange, perhaps?).

Just noodling. But that's my guess: Sentry.

Now the real question. Was that part of the deal with Mephisto...perhaps what Mary Jane whispered to him? Or was it just a natural occurrence of the new timeline--without MJ's support he wasn't as confident of his decision to reveal his identity, so he recanted and rigged up a giant Zatanna for everyone?

Obviously, I think about these things too much...

From the November solicit for Age of the Sentry #3:

Unfamiliar with Ozark ways, our hero is also bound by the Code of the Hills to marry cousin Ellie!

Because that's what we really need from Marvel right now: cousin marriage!! A good hillbilly story will finally make the man with the power of a million exploding suns popular with the readership...

Of course, I would have thought that you wouldn't have needed anything extra to make a man with the power of a million exploding suns interesting...but what the hell, a Hee Haw sketch can't hurt!!

Prediction for issue #4: Each of the Sentry's personalities asks a different girl on a date--AT THE SAME TIME!! Hilarity ensues...