The Three Faces of Bob
The title character of Milligan’s and Fegredo’s Enigma is basically a postmodern riff on Pinocchio, trying to teach himself how to be a real boy by treating 1970s comics as an instruction manual, a guide for self-transformation into a metafictional superhero. As a model for humanity, these comics are clearly lacking. Small wonder Enigma’s story is one that only a cranky lizard could tell.
But what if his touchstone were the Marvel comics of the 1960s? What would Enigma have been like?
Fortunately, comics seem to hold all the answers to all the questions, even if the answers are not entirely satisfying. In this case, Paul Jenkins, Rick Veitch, and Jae Lee at Marvel created their own oblique response to a query that they themselves may never have intended to pose, when they developed a nearly omnipotent hero with dissociative identity disorder: The Sentry. [1]
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF BOB
The Sentry debuted in the year 2000 as a massive retroactive change to Marvel’s continuity (a “retcon”). Sad sack Robert (“Bob”) Reynolds used to be the heroic Sentry, but no one remembers him. The Sentry’s archnemesis, the Void, turns out to be a separate personality inhabiting the Sentry’s body, and all knowledge of both the Sentry and the Void had been erased from the world’s memory in order to prevent Reynold’s dark side from bringing on Armageddon.
The Sentry shares part of its premise with Alan Moore’s revamp of Marvelman/Miracleman, whose main character was a middle-aged man who had forgotten that he could turn into a superhuman by saying a magic word. The original character, along with Moore’s take on it, was rooted in the Golden Age comics of the 1940s, but The Sentry was firmly entrenched in what Stan Lee liked to call the “Marvel Age” of comics: everything about the Sentry’s origins, not to mention his “forgotten” early adventures, was a pastiche of the company’s 1960s output.
OK, MAYBE ALAN MOORE DID IT BETTER. SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
As a teenager, Bob was yet another variation on Peter Parker, a bullied high school student who couldn’t catch a break. That is, until he drank the mysterious Professor’s super-scientific formula, which transformed him into the hero with “the power of a million exploding suns.” Jenkins and Veitch had intended to use the Sentry as a super heroic Zelig with untold adventures from Marvel’s past (Veitch even developed costume designs to match each decade’s aesthetic). Arguably, the Sentry is one of many attempts at giving Marvel its own Superman, a proposition that is certainly justified by the hero’s power set. But even though Superman established the secret identity as a primary superhero trope, it would fall to Marvel to begin exploring the ramifications of the dual identity. The Sentry’s schizoid premise, his early costume, and his troubled attempts at balancing the human with the superhuman are twenty-first-century variations on a familiar set of Sixties themes.[2]
RETCONNING THE RETCON: BOB REYNOLDS, NOW GRIM AND GRITTY!
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and the other prime movers of early Marvel did more than simply “update” or “modernize” the superhero for the 1960s. They filled the pre-existing shell of the Golden Age superhero (extraordinary powers in most cases, the secret identity, and an origin story) with the content it had sorely lacked. Lee would tell future Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada the secret of the perfect Marvel hero:
“So imagine Spider-Man in his red and blue suit. And he’s at the precipice of a building. And he’s looking out at the cavernous city ahead of him. And the wind is blowing. Maybe there’s some rain coming down. He Thwips! his web, and he swings across the city... That’s a pretty good scene. Right, Joey?”
And I’m like, “Yeah. That’s a pretty good scene.”
Then he said, “But tell me who is inside that suit. Tell me who he loves. Tell me who loves him. Tell me what he does for a living. Tell me what his struggles are. Tell me what his pains are, what he dreams of. Now, when he Thwips! that web and jumps across the city, our hearts are inside that suit and they clutch. Because we’re either him, or we know somebody just like him.”
Lee usually framed his lessons about Marvel in terms of character, in that character is more important than plot. But his phrasing in Quesada’s recollection of their conversation is much more revealing: “tell me who is inside that suit.” Lee and his collaborators usually gave their characters a self, a sense of an inner life. Part of the formula was to emphasize the hero’s real-life problems, but even that is result of a more important development: exploiting the possibilities of the “secret identity” concept in order to posit a troubled, conflicted, non-unitary self.
As we shall see, this divided, and therefore somewhat complex, self would often be developed through metaphors of reversible transformation (the Hulk, Thor), permanent monstrosity (the Thing), the destructive role the masked identity plays in the unmasked life (Spider-Man), or entrapment behind a mask or within a suit of armor (Iron Man, Dr. Doom). Early Marvel made the drama of often-divided selfhood visible, an understandable choice for depicting the abstract and ethereal within a pictorial medium. The Sentry extrapolates from early Marvel’s attention to divided selfhood by treating it as mental illness (itself a problematic endeavor, but we’ll let it pass for now). The Sentry and the Void not only threaten the integrity and sanity of Bob, the original personality, but their conflict is always on the verge of the apocalyptic.
The only solution available to the Sentry involves repression and invisibility: using superpowers to make the entire world, including Bob Reynolds, forget his existence. Just as the Marvel Age secret identity expresses self through metaphor, the Sentry’s hypnotic retcon of his own “continuity” shows repression to be more than self-denial: it is denial of self.
The Sentry comics also remind us of Stan Lee’s equation of self-expression with constant verbalization. The "Marvel method” he developed with his artistic collaborators meant that Lee, faced with fully-rendered pages, overlaid them with excessive, often superfluous words. Lee clearly did not trust his audience to understand what they were seeing, since his characters so often described the action around them in obsessive detail. It is fitting, then, that Lee devoted at least as much effort to explaining what the readers could not see: the inner states of his characters, usually expressed in melodramatic dialogue, if not monologue. The Sentry does not adopt Lee’s style (indeed, its second-person narration would only be used by some Marvel comics in the 1970s), but it still function as a variation on the impulse to create monologues.
Finally, if obliquely, The Sentry gestures in the direction of one of early Marvel’s constant preoccupation: the nature and value of humanity. Where DC’s Superman rarely portrayed the Clark Kent/Superman dual identity as a question of psychology or subjectivity, Marvel used the contrast between the human and the superhuman as both a source of personal drama and a brief in favor of Western humanism. Just as Lee portrays the heroic costume as the fancy, attention-getting wrapping around the much more important “character” of the person behind the mask, the juxtaposition of human and superhuman, while obviously based on the fantastic appeal of enhanced abilities, led to repeated encomiums on the nobility of “man.”
The Sentry reminds us of this dynamic by serving as its demonic parody: in the potentially world-shattering psychodrama of Bob, the Sentry, and the Void, it is a race to the bottom rather than to the top. The Sentry is unstable, the Void is pure evil, but it is Bob Reynolds, later revealed to be a juvenile delinquent drug addict, who wins the prize for ignobility. As an adult, Bob is the hollowed-out shell of a man, all of his drives channeled into his endlessly battling superpowers selves.
The Sentry is the Marvel superhero as abject failure.
Notes
[1] Veitch was instrumental in the early phases of the character’s creation, but was not part of the project when it was finally released.
[2] In the second Sentry miniseries (2006), however, writer Jenkins reveals that young Bob was no innocent. A drug addict looking to get high, he stole the formula that gave him superpowers. In other words, the Sentry went from a Sixties character to an Eighties character.