Interview: Sentry Co-Creator Paul Jenkins on Thunderbolts*, Portraying Mental Health, and More.

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 two of our conversation.

How does it feel seeing the complex hero continue on in the mainstream Marvel Universe after his initial miniseries?

I suppose I'm grateful that he came back in the mainstream on a practical level for me, right? Because obviously, the Sentry now is a massive character in the Thunderbolts* and will go on for a long time.

Brian [Michael Bendis] called me up to say he was doing it. I can't speak for Brian, but I can vaguely remember what he said at the time. He said, “Someone was talking smack about there being no new good characters. And he's like, that's bullshit. There's Venom, and there's this, and there's that, and there's the Sentry.” And he's like, “No, there's a Sentry, let's bring him back and do something with it.” I don't have this bit where I feel like I'm the controller and sole voice of the Sentry. When I finished with him, others could take over and tell their own stories. And that's great, right?

It's very funny that he put me in it, because he was doing this existential story. The way he wrote me, I gave jim shit for the way he did my British accent. And I faint, as well, I fall over and faint. But, had it not been for the reintroduction and the real use of the character, then we wouldn't have had any legs. And now, of course, he's been in loads of stuff and he's just mainstream… he's there all the time, they use him all the time. How they use him is completely different from the way I write him.

But then again, how they use Spider-Man is exactly different from the way I wrote him. I had my own period at Marvel where they let me write whatever I wanted. And it was all about character building. I'm a character guy. It was all about people. My run on Spider-Man is the weirdest run in some ways, because people absolutely adore it. But they were all single issues and Marvel hated me writing single issues, they bitched at me the whole time. However, I felt that the audience needed to read just one issue. And let me tell you, I have many people, even to this day, who come back with certain issues. If someone comes up to me holding an issue with two hands and they're crying, I know it's Peter Parker number 33. I can almost guarantee it. 

How important was it that this character is struggling with mental illness in a way that you do not see all that often? How proud of that are you?

Yeah. I’m very much so. I've been reached out to by many people. I literally had an example this week, someone who reached out to me and said, “I struggle with my mental health. Would you mind reading my pitch for the Sentry?” And I went, “yeah, send it over. And I read it and gave that person a commentary back on what I thought they had done.”

This character, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me in my career and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for creating the Sentry, because I feel like I was represented.” I did this series called Alters with AfterShock, whereas basically, people with disadvantages in society, and they were given a hyper advantage in this case. This kind of power that they got… this alteration. And that was originally a pitch for the X-Men. I just wanted to create a bunch of new mutants whose power, essentially, is a disadvantage in society.

It could be a social disadvantage, a physical disadvantage. It could be somebody suffering from Alzheimer's, and beginning to deteriorate, and just put them in a superhero suit. So you've got a hyper advantage, and you've got a disadvantage. And it's all about the collision in the middle, which is the person. Yeah.

And so, Marvel didn't do it, because they said, “We don't do new characters.” And I'm like, “I did the fucking Sentry with you. Yeah, we do new characters.” But it's always the same. I think it's just that there's a certain risk aversion in the mainstream; I think they get what they need. I don't want to criticize them only; I think they're not geared up to make new things. I think that Marvel and big publishers often forget the why of why people are entertained by things.

And I'm being asked, “can you do that wizardy literary shit that you do with our superheroes, right?” That's literally the way they approached it. And so we did Inhumans, and it was so successful. And if you add that to the success of Kevin Smith writing Daredevil, and I'll always go to bat for Chris Priest, and having 50 issues of Black Panther. I think that Marvel and big publishers often forget the why of why people are entertained by things.

What’s it like seeing Sentry as a benchmark for power, such as his interaction with Knull in the King in Black?

Well, I think it's understandable.

If I were to make a criticism within Marvel over time, it would be something like this. I sometimes think that the big publishers and maybe the people working don't understand the whole point of what they have. So, I'll use Black Bolt as an example. I came to Marvel barely writing anything. We go in and we get given this book. They say. “Do what we like, because we're failing, we're going out of business.” So you might as well bring that wizardy shit and do what you do, Jenkins. And so they sent me two five-page Jack Kirby stories, and that's it. And I tell them, “Don't send me anymore. I don't want to read all the old issues. I get it. This is great. It's a metaphor for America. Like you've got the alpha primitives who are free, but not free. That's a metaphor for the emancipation of Black America. You've got kids going to the Terrigen mist. That's a metaphor for puberty. You've got a royal family with a guy that's ultra, ultra powerful, but he can't speak. That's a metaphor for royalty and the controlling of people. I can write this. And I just started writing that.”

So I'm writing Black Bolt. And I think we had 12 issues, and I think sometime around issues nine and ten, you got fans writing in in those days asking, “When's he going to do something? Black Bolt's just standing there with his arms behind his back. He's not saying anything.” And I'm like, “Yep, you got the tension now.” The whole point was that Black Bolt cannot speak. The whole conceit of Black Bolt was that he had all this power, but he could not speak. And so he doesn't speak in our Inhumans. We didn't have him speak. The one thing that was so obvious about Black Bolt was that he had never been defeated in battle. We made the book popular. The very next series had him get defeated in battle for the first time. You fucking blew it. You ruined your own character. You had it. And you went, “Hey, well, great for you that he was defeated in battle for the first time. But now you can never say he's never been defeated in battle.”

It was the same thing with any of these things. So I think you can look at that with the Sentry and say we had these things. He was incredibly powerful, the power of a million exploding suns. However, he couldn't use it in some ways due to The Void. That's a great conceit. So it shouldn't be about whether or not. If he uses that power, The Void does something equal. And so you cannot do it. And if you do, you're going to pay for it because all the way back to Constantine… I wouldn't let him use magic because magic costs you more than you pay for than you get. So you can solve something temporarily. You get a Band-Aid, but it costs you more than it's worth. Sentry using his powers at times is more. And that's his conceit. So if he gets ripped up by Knull or he rips up Ares it’s a fun, comic-y thing, but it's meaningless. You're just trying to say, OK, Knull is the most powerful now. Well, let's see who rips Knull in half. Who cares? It's like you constantly have to build these steps to like. Right. Oh, if we're going to say this guy's powerful, like we've got to have them killing the powerful person.

We had a built-in conceit, just like Black Bolt. Whereas I think if you're going, “This is the most powerful, then why doesn't he just rip everyone up and go do whatever he likes?”You know, it's it. I think that type of creation doesn't help. It doesn't move things forward.

Did you ever believe you’d see Sentry in live action, as he’s set to appear in the upcoming Thunderbolts* film in the MCU?

I don't know. I suppose the weirdest thing for me is that my entire adult working life has been pretty much up here because, you know, I started off with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And so all of this seems normal in some ways.

Does the titular team stand a chance?

He's the villain and also not the villain. So what can you do? I suppose it will be a lot of the push and pull of Bob's problems, trying to come to terms with them, and seeing what he can do.

Have you had experience with a character you've created being adapted into a live-action film yet?

Well, I've certainly had a lot of my stories used.

I'll tell you, there's actually this kind of thrilling thing. I didn't know this until, like, maybe a year and a half ago, because no one bothered to tell me. But, Chris Evans famously took a single issue of a comic book around with him as Captain America for all three of his films. It was the issue of Mythos that I wrote about Captain America. And apparently he said everywhere, “ This is the comic. This is the essence of Captain America.” It's really cool to know that he took one story I wrote, which is heartfelt. And I'm very proud of everything I did with Captain America. I come from a military family. I've many friends in the military. I'm exposed to the military; I've been to military school, you know.

So I'm not unused to my work constantly being out there, and I've done a lot of work in video games. It's been right out in front of people. I created the Origin of Wolverine, right?

Have you had the chance to read the most recent Sentry series from Jason Loo and Ben Harvey?

No, I don't read that many comics, so I don't know that much.