New Avengers: Sentry (2)

The New Avengers – Sentry is the second title in the New Avengers collections and as the title suggests nearly the entire book is dedicated to the search for and comprehension of Sentry.  Who is he?  Why does nobody remember him?  They even ask, is he just a comic book character instead of an actual real life hero – a hyperrealistic question if ever there was one?

The story begins with a meeting of the Illuminati, and if you don’t know who they are I’m not going to spoil it here for you.  It’s actually not critical to the story but I figured it was worth a mention.  After that Wolverine, Spider-Man, Luke Cage and Spider-Woman have a heart to heart with Wrecker, one of the many super-villains that escaped from the Raft – a high security prison for super powered criminals (see Breakout).  Wrecker’s alone so all the power inside his magical crowbar is his own, which means he doesn’t have to share it with the rest of the Wrecking Crew and that makes him an extremely powerful foe as our heroes find out when he hands them a proper whooping.

Ok, it’s a decent fight, but one continuity problem: in one panel Wrecker slams his crowbar into Luke Cage who ends up flying back into the wing of of the Quinjet the New Avengers had flown to Long Island on.  The impact does a significant amount of damage to the wing of the plane, more than it does to Luke Cage. Pages later when the fight is over, Iron Man calls the team and tells them to ‘assemble’, by which he means they need to get their butts on the quinjet and meet him in Connecticut.  In the next panel, the New Avengers are seen boarding the plane.  How do you fly a plane with a broken wing?  I can see how they missed it because they’re telling the story out of synch with time so the panels keep flipping between past events and the current which means the fight spans over several different scenes.  It’s not really a huge deal, but on a A-list type of book, it’s a flaw that probably shouldn’t have been overlooked.

That aside, as I alluded to earlier most of the book is trying to resolve a problem with Sentry, a super hero that no one can remember.  The solution involves bringing together the combined forces of the Inhumans, the New Avengers, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.  That’s quite a collection heroes and it would be really cool to see them all battling it out with some fiend, but that’s not what happens.  Well, actually it happens, but it happens off the page.  We – the reader – miss out on all the action!  What we do get to witness are scenes of possible past story lines that may or may not have occurred, comic panels intentionally drawn like it’s still the Golden Age of comics, a lot of discussion about the problem at hand and a vague solution which resolves everything in a single panel.  Huh?

Yeah, that’s the problem, the whole book leaves you feeling like you missed out on what was supposed to be important.  We miss the grand battle, the resolution is just a bright white light and we end up with a super-hero that has the ‘power of a thousand suns‘.  I feel fully cheated and what’s worse is that it all feels like a contrived way for me to be able to accept one of the most powerful characters Marvel has to offer being dumped into an existing world without him having to have a history.  Dumped is the right word, because honestly it’s like the Beyonder dropped a deuce and it turned into Sentry.  Seriously, you guys could have done better.

I was really disappointed with the follow-up to Breakout which by all accounts was a entertaining read.  Hopefully the guys pulled it back by book three or I might have to abondon the series in search for something better.

It’s also worth mentioning that this TPB includes some bonus content at the end of the book.  They included a dossier of super-villians and a list of super-powered prisons they called the “New Avengers Most Wanted List“.  From what I can tell, all of the villians listed actually broke out of the Raft in Breakout.  It’s a kind of cool resource for getting caught up with your favorite villians in the Marvel Universe or even learning about someone new.  If my count is right it’s 51 pages long and it’s very text heavy. The dossier is a decent add-on and one of the saving graces of this TPB.