I'm glad that The Sentry is dead.
Let me frame that for you.
I love the Sentry as a character and as an idea. I think that the original Sentry miniseries by Paul Jenkins, along with its one-shot tie-ins in th Fanntastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man, and so on, is probably the best original superhero story I've read in a long time. It's probably the best superhero story I've ever read that isn't called Miracleman or Kingdom Come. That first series is an excellent meditation on optimism in comics, and a beautiful love letter to the stories that made comics wonderful in the Golden and Silver Ages. Robert Reynolds is fantastic in how he differentiates himself from Superman or Miracleman, how he gives up everything in the end to help restore some optimism to the world.
I was never sure what to think about the decision to bring Sentry back in New Avengers. I was pretty sure it could only end poorly.
I'm more satisfied than I thought I would be with the way the Sentry has been handled - even if they mangled bits of his characterization, they sitll held to the idea that getting rid of him was the only way to assert some level of optimism again, and that the only way for the pessimism embodied in the Sentry to go away was for it to choose to go away. That's good. I kind of like that.
The Sentry was killed in Siege #4, a result of making himself open to being murdered. Thor blasted him to smithereens, but that wouldn't have mattere if the Sentry hadn't let go of lif entirely - prior to this he could come back from anything, anything, as if it had never happened. You could have hit him with balefire from the Wheel of Time and ten seconds later he would have come back eaten your skull. That fits the character. It's fine. It was a good death, though the pacing in the issue is pretty awful.
But there was nothing done with this character in the past five years that wasn't done before and better in the initial miniseries by Paul Jenkins. If they had left the character alone as of the end of that series, I think he would have gone down as oen of the classiest and most artful characters Marvel has produced in the past thirty or forty years. Shit, almost fifty, now.
The initial miniseries ended with Robert Reynolds, a drunk with anxiety issues so bad that he could barely go outside, standing in the middle of a crowd with his wife and buying a hotdog. It was an enormous moment for the character, just being outside, and having him do this simple thing was an encapsulation of all of the optimism that the character was supposed to stand for.
In Siege, the final image of Robert Reynolds is a charred skeleton wrapped in Thor's cape being gently released to fall into the Sun. It's an image of death, rather than a life reconsidered and alternatively fulfilled.
I'm glad the Sentry is dead, because it means they can't do anything else to trivialize what initially made him such a powerful concept.
I just wish they had never brought him back at all.
