Paul Jenkins on Creating The Sentry, The Void, and The Hero's Place In The Marvel Universe (Part 1)

Paul Jenkins is a British-born comic writer whose work includes Hellblazer, Wolverine: Origin, The Inhumans, and Spectacular Spider-Man. One of his most acclaimed works is The Sentry, a miniseries with Jae Lee and José Villarrubia that tells the story of a hero the world forgot about, as he discovers his past and the dark secret behind Sentry’s disappearance. Sentry will make his first live-action appearance in the upcoming Thunderbolts* movie, played by Lewis Pullman. I talked to Jenkins about creating the character and his introduction in the Marvel Universe! Here’s part one of our conversation.

How did Bob Reynolds/The Sentry come to be? What do you remember about the marketing campaign with Stan Lee?

I started with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was the second employee to work there at Mirage, and I helped make the comics get out, but very quickly, it became licensing. Then we went to Tundra Publishing, which obviously didn't work. I ended up being very lucky. I got to be Alan Moore's editor, edit all these incredible people, and bring their projects through.

So I was at Alan's house on Big Numbers — a book that never came out. I was talking to him, and he was showing me an incredible chart he was making about how each of the characters worked in the story. I just was like, “I think like that.” And I said, “Alan, you know, I see these comics that come out and I see what you do and it's completely different from what I see in the mainstream. I feel like I've got something to say. And I'm just watching the way you construct a story. I know it sounds crazy. You're Alan Moore, and I'm nobody, but I think like that. “You think I should have a go at it?” And he's like, “Yeah, why not, Paul?” I went to DC, and I pitched to write about Hellblazer. And next thing you know, I was a writer on Hellblazer. I didn't know what I'd done. I just literally broke in from nowhere. But they saw something in me, I think.

I'll always be grateful to my editor, Lou Stathis, and to Karen Berger for giving me that chance when they absolutely should not have done so. I started writing Hellblazer, and I thought, “Well, I want to do more.” But what I knew was Vertigo, right? I knew the Vertigo environment. And so I pitched to Karen.

But I heard about Hourman and said, “Hey, Karen, how would you feel if I pitched you this character Hourman?” Because I thought it's incredible that you have a drug that would make you a superhero for an hour. It would be the most addictive thing in the universe. I think that the 23 hours that he didn't take it, his brain would say, I've got to take the drug. I've got to take the drug. So it could be about drug addiction and about mental health issues, right? And Karen, quite fairly, I think, said, “Look, Paul, the problem is that Vertigo, we just don't do any superheroes now. We don't do them, right?” She said, “If Alan pitched me Watchmen for Vertigo, I would say no, I wouldn't do it, right? Because that's not what Vertigo is.” She said, “Why don't you just go make a character that does that?” So I went home to Massachusetts, where I was working at Tundra, and I wrote. And I wrote up this pitch for Sentry. The very first issue that you see with Sentry is actually, I literally wrote that issue. I wrote the story for it.

I ended up pitching it to a couple of editors, and they rejected it. I went to Marvel. I had an editor there. She liked it, but she couldn't get it to go through. DC wouldn't do it. Nobody would do the Sentry. And probably about two years after that, I asked Rick Veitch a favor, “Hey man, can you draw me a picture of the Sentry so I can just add it to my pitch to see if it will help? So he drew a picture of a character in a superhero thing in Rick's style.” Sentry had already existed as a pitch for maybe two years before I asked him for that picture. So I think the idea of the co-creation or anything like that is not even close because it already exists. The first story had already been written. And then what happened with Sentry was that after having it rejected so many times, we finally got to Inhumans at Marvel. And I had been brought in by Jae Lee, and we won an Eisner, and they just hadn't won one in so long that they said, “You can do whatever you like now.”

And I said, I want to do the Sentry. Marvel said, “Not that, you can do Spider-Man or Avengers or whatever.” And I was like, “No.” And Jae agreed with me. He really liked the Sentry. So we pitched that and they said, okay, we'll commit to it, to their credit. And they helped the marketing plan for it was that it had been discovered in Stan's cupboard by Artie Rosen.

Artie Rosen was someone that I made up because he came from Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, two old-style letterers. So we just matched the words together. So Artie Rosen seems so plausible. And what Wizard Magazine did was they bought into it by publishing a fake obituary for Artie. And so Blanche Rosen had found these old files, and she gave them to Marvel, but they'd been stuck in a cupboard for years. And I eventually found them.

No one could remember where this came from, but apparently it was one of Stan Lee's old creations with Artie. And it was all bogus. And so we did that for a year. We did the dog and pony show of promoting it. And then out came the Sentry.

How did your personal relationship with comics help shape the Sentry?

You have to look at all of it in context.

The first thing to take into context is that I'm not your average comic book creator in some ways. So I grew up very poor, and we didn't have many comics — we had a couple. I think my brother and I can remember the six or seven comics we had, you know, a couple of Marvel issues. So we had Spider-Man and Daredevil. And I think we got to see the Fantastic Four because I liked The Thing, but we didn't have comics. A lot of the comics we did have, if we had any, were British comics, like little daily strips of cartoons, like The Beano or The Dandy.

Additionally, we had EC comics. We're little kids, right? So those were shaping our thoughts. So, if you put it into that context, even when Jae asked me to come over to do Inhumans, I'd never heard of Inhumans. I didn't know who they were. And I had an advantage right there. I marched to the beat of the drum that I marched to. It was to my advantage because I could write stories that I feel are much newer, fresher, and more interesting in some ways, at least to me. So I was taking a more literary approach, maybe, as opposed to having read hundreds of comic issues.

Sentry was very unique. And I think so was Inhumans. And so was a lot of the stuff that I do. If you understand the context of me not being a guy who knows much about comics or is steeped in the history of comics, it makes more sense why I could take a different take on some of these characters.

And how does that relate to weaving Sentry’s story throughout Marvel history?

Right, so there's an exciting thing. I'm glad you asked that question because you just have to look at that first series and see what I did. So I felt that the evolution of comics throughout the years mirrored a drug experience, the experience of a drug addiction. You start in the 50s, and it's all there. It's the first time you've done it. It's the 40s, 50s, whatever. So, imagine this is where this stuff gets put into motion, right? In the 70s, anything goes, right? 60s and 70s, it's like, woo, flower power, right? So you're tripping, right? And that's what they were. Those stories were all over the place, right? They were very reflective of the age. But in the 80s, when Alan Moore was at his height, and other people like Alan, suddenly reality hits. It's more realistic.

Reality hits. In the 90s, it got tough. It gets dark and gritty. And then it's been recovering ever since, right? So it's in recovery in some ways. And sometimes it relapses into the old bad. And sometimes it can do some new things.

And so if you look at those old flashbacks, I created a bunch of entirely bogus flashbacks that represented the various ages of comics. And so, as Sentry remembered his own history, it was also reflective of his addiction to a drug.

One of the book's core concepts is duality, and not necessarily just with the Sentry. Bob's friendship with the Hulk is one of the most interesting relationships in that book. I think it's such a terrific way of showing how these characters can be perceived in a certain way..

I'd remained friends with Bill Sienkiewicz. And when I called him and asked him if he would do the issue with the Hulk in Sentry, it was the first comic he had done for years. And he asked me, “Paul, practically, given that I'm working now and getting back into doing comics, can they mostly be two-panel pages?” And I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to ensure that.”

If you look at the book, it's very unusual because there are two-panel pages all the way through. Just so that on a practical level, as you tell the story, he practically couldn't draw five and six-panel pages. Remember, Big Numbers was a nine-panel grid. And that was, well, it was excruciating for him, right? I said, “Sure, we can do two-panel pages. And so all the way through the book are these two-panel pages. It allows Bill's art to express itself and fits the style.

Speaking of duality, half of Sentry was the Golden Guardian of good, who doesn't cast a shadow. And then the other half is The Void, right? But when the Hulk was in his presence, the Hulk's skin didn't hurt anymore because no one had bothered to ask the Hulk why he was so angry. And in part, it's because he was in pain. And so in the presence of the Sentry, he was like a little faithful lapdog. He was like a sidekick.

He's really sweet because the Sentry calmed him down, and his aura took away the pain.

What was it like seeing the gorgeous illustrations brought to life by Jae Lee and José Villarrubia?

José definitely added so much to that project, right? That’s something that can't be understated is that José was so brilliant in his work.

The first thing to understand is a person that most people wouldn't know was Joe Quesada's wife, Nanci, who retained her name, Nanci Dakesian, and made quite a name for herself. She was our editor because while none of the dialogue was edited, there was, in my entire time at Marvel up until like a specific point, they never edited a single word of what I wrote all the way through Civil War… never had a change, maybe a couple of issues sometimes, but usually they just left everything, every word I write intact.

But what Nanci was capable of doing — getting Jae, who had been in a crisis of confidence, where I think he had produced two issues of a comic in three years prior to Inhumans. So if you wanna look at someone that really helped make this project, Nancy would definitely be one of them because she was able to get twelve issues of Inhumans, five issues of the Sentry out of Jae. That's seventeen issues over the course of three years, where Jae had done two over the course of three years before.

Working with Jae was great.

Sentry was so easy for me to understand, I often find, Liam, that there are moments in comics, in stories, whether it be a screenplay that I write or whether it be a comic or something else. And you can find a moment. You can see these moments. I knew the moment of this very slow story where Bob goes to the cupboard and pulls on the Sentry suit and it's just a brown anorak jacket. It's not. “And you're like, oh man, that guy is nuts. I was almost there. I almost believed him." And he's obviously just a drug addict. And he goes, it feels good to wear the old Sentry suit again. And he walks out in the backyard and he walks up into the sky. And you're like, oh shit, which one now? And so I knew that these moments existed.

And I kind of felt like if I could describe those scenes right, those would be the moments that Jae will hang his hat on. Because look at how lucky I was. I'd spent five or six years working with Sean Phillips on Hellblazer, who's so brilliant at these moments of people. And my style is writing about people and the emotional connection between people. And so then I went from Sean to Jae. And that's pretty lucky, right? And Jae and I just fit. So when I saw the first issue, just seeing it was exactly what I had imagined it would be.

How did you balance teasing the reveal of the Void?

Yeah, yeah. I have always had a three-arc series for the Sentry. I knew what it was.

I mean, I got to do two of them at Marvel. The first one was just him kind of remembering and coming back into being and accepting and beginning to understand that he was who he was. And I think when you start something, you need to know where you're going. At least I always do.

I've had interesting conversations with other comic writers and creators about when they start typing or making something, and they find out where they go at the same time, which I couldn't do. I don't think I could do that at all. So I'm pretty structured in the way that I work. I break down all of my books, page by page. I just write each page exactly the way that I expect it to be. So I'm really meticulous about it.

I break down the scenes. I break down the pages and the panels and put them together. So I knew from the beginning that Sentry was the Void, and this story was about mental health. It was about two sides of him. And in part, it was about the part that he couldn't accept. The Void is part of him.

I was very excited to write the second series. Because one of the things in the second series was pointing out, well, he actually wasn't special. He was addicted to drugs, and he is struggling with mental health. And this happens to him. And one of the things that I toyed with, and one of the things that can potentially live in it, is whether or not this serum affected him specifically more than it would anybody else. For whatever reason, whether he's a mutant or whatever… but it doesn't really matter because that's just like comic book kind of fun. I love that stuff. But the whole point was this question we ask ourselves: Who am I? And what's the point of me? And who have I become? And how have I become that person? What shapes you, right? It can be the things you do, but it can also be the chemical imbalance in your brain. It can be any number of things. And so it was an examination of mental health issues.

And we made him his own worst enemy. We gave him... Interesting thing, Liam, I gave him a specific diagnosis. He was a disorganized type of schizophrenic with agoraphobia and a certain type of personality disorder. And I sent that to Marvel and said, That's how that character needs to be written forever. And everyone ignored it. But I know what his diagnosis was.

Was the original Sentry run intended to have a beginning, middle, and end? If the original works were the only time the character would have appeared, it would be fitting for the story.

Yeah, I could have been okay with the first one. Except perhaps not, because I did think of a trilogy for it. I knew what I was going to do, I got to do two of them.

I think the idea is that we all go through this life where we sort of say you become something over time, from a kid to an adult. And then you ask yourself the question as you get older: Who am I? And what am I doing? And what should I change? And then I think as you get near the end, you start saying, wait a minute, where am I going? What was the point of all of this? And so that was the whole point of Sentry: to make those three stories in three different things. But like you, I agree that we could have ended it because ultimately he ends up doing one of the most heroic acts of heroism, that he was an addict and he could only get rid of his own pain by becoming the Sentry, but he knew it created the Void.

And so he gave up his heroic life in the ultimate act of heroism. From the original story, you see someone who just fights. Like, what was my purpose? Why am I remembering some of this stuff? What's going on? And then everyone around him was kind of reacting the same way.

PART 2 OF MY TALK WITH SENTRY ABOUT THE CHARACTER’S CURRENT PLACE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE AND APPEARANCE IN THUNDERBOLTS* COMES OUT NEXT WEEK.

This interview has been edited for clarity.