One of my favorite readings of the year is in Richard Linklater’s Killer, when Glen Powell’s character Gary comes clean to Adria Arjona’s character Madison and explains that he was pretending to be someone else. The moment is capped off by Arjona’s hilariously high-pitched voice of “Who the hell what the hell is GARY?!” It’s a murder every time. I say all this to say, if you’ve seen the trailer for Marvel’s new movie, Thunderbolts*, then you may have come to the point where Lewis Pullman’s character “Bob” is introduced and asked yourself, believe it or not: “Who the hell shit Is bob?!” with a similar tenor and tone.
Readers, that’s a good question. Pullman plays a character named Robert Reynolds, which means he’s most likely playing an MCU version of the Marvel hero called The Sentry. The character was originally developed by Paul Jenkins and Rick Veitch in the late ’90s, before Jenkins released a miniseries in 2000 with art by Jae Lee. The character’s history is a bizarrely long and winding road even by comic book standards. In the original series, a middle-aged version of Bob remembers that he was once a superhero named Sentry who possesses the power of a million suns, which he gained by taking a version of the Super Soldier Serum. Fearing the return of his arch-enemy “The Void,” Bob seeks out other Marvel heroes to help him. Over the course of the series, it is revealed that Sentry and Void are two sides of the same coin, manifestations of Bob’s anxiety and schizophrenia. Basically, Bob is Marvel’s Superman if Superman were also Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Of course, the Sentry had never appeared in a Marvel comic before the original Jenkins/Lee miniseries, but there is an explanation for why he appears seemingly out of nowhere; we learn that in order to protect the world from his dark side, Bob recruited Dr. Strange and Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four to erase the world’s memory of him. That first series ends with him doing the same thing again for the same reason. But comics being comics, it was only a matter of time before other writers found a reason to put Bob in their stories. Writer Brian Michael Bendis eventually used Sentry as a crucial part of his Mighty Avengers story in which Tony Stark enlists his help in exchange for trying to find a cure for his mental problems. From then on, he becomes an integral part of Bendis’ Dark Avengers Run in which Norman Osborn convinces The Void to take over Bob and obey his orders.
Because Bob’s two personalities are constantly fighting for control, he is often too dangerous to leave unattended, and that is the element that Thunderbolts* seems to be doing harm. When Yelena (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and others encounter Bob in the trailer, he is wearing what looks like a doctor’s coat. Although we don’t know who exactly is pulling the strings at this point, it initially suggests that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Val has sent Yelena, Walker and the other antiheroes of the MCU to either save Bob or provoke him into taking her out for her. Either way, one of the most complex and complicated heroes in recent comic book history will be the focus of a major Marvel film if Thunderbolts* will be released next May.
