One of my favorite line readings of the year is in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, when Glen Powell’s character of Gary comes clean to Adria Arjona’s character Madison about how he’s been pretending to be someone else. The moment is perfectly deflated by Arjona’s hilariously high-pitched delivery of “Who the fuck is GARY?!” It kills every time. I say all of this to say, if you watched the trailer for Marvel’s new movie, Thunderbolts*, then you may have gotten to the point where Lewis Pullman’s character “Bob” is introduced and wondered, to yourself or out loud, “Who the fuck is Bob?!” with a similar tenor and tone.
Dear reader, that’s a good question. Pullman is playing a character named Robert Reynolds, which means he’s most likely playing an MCU version of the Marvel hero known as The Sentry. Originally developed in the late 90s by Paul Jenkins and Rick Veitch before landing a mini-series in 2000 from Jenkins with art by Jae Lee, the character’s history is, even by comic book standards, a bizarrely long and winding road. The original series involves a middle-aged version of Bob remembering that he was once a superhero called Sentry, who has the power of a million suns that came from taking a version of the super soldier serum. Afraid that his archfoe “The Void” is returning, Bob seeks out other Marvel heroes to help him. Over the course of the series, it’s 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’s an explanation as to why he shows up seemingly out of nowhere; we learn that in order to protect the world from his dark side, Bob enlisted 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 comic books being comic books, it was only a matter of time before other writers found a reason to involve Bob in their stories. Writer Brian Michael Bendis ended up using Sentry as a critical part of his Mighty Avengers story, where Tony Stark enlists his help in exchange for trying to find a cure for his mental issues. From there, he becomes a main fixture during Bendis’ Dark Avengers run, where Norman Osborn coaxes out The Void to take over Bob and do his bidding.
Because Bob’s two personalities are constantly jockeying for control, he’s often too dangerous to be left unchecked, which is the element that Thunderbolts* looks to be playing up. When Yelena (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and others encounter Bob in the trailer, he’s wearing what looks to be a medical gown. While we don’t know at this stage who is exactly pulling the strings, the initial implication is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Val has sent Yelena, Walker, and the other anti-heroes of the MCU to either rescue Bob or provoke him so that he’ll take them out for her. Either way, one of the most complex and complicated heroes in recent comic book memory will take center stage in a major Marvel movie when Thunderbolts* releases next May.
