Avengerspalooza #4--Mary Sue

For this and all posts today, SPOILER ALERT for Siege and the 95 Avengers titles released Wednesday...SPOILERS start after the Avengers logo...



As an epilogue to Civil War, Marvel gave us Civil War: Front Line #11, written by Paul Jenkins. And it was the worst comic book of all time. Cap was wrong because he didn't have a MySpace account. Ye gods.

Well, lightning couldn't strike twice, could it??

Well, yeah, it could. And did.

In all fairness, Sentry: Fallen Sun #1 is nowhere near as bad as CW:FL #11. Nothing could be.

And, since Jenkins created the Sentry, it's perhaps fitting that he gets to write the coda to the Sentry's troubled life.

But what does he give us? A tone deaf, self-aggrandizing exercise in Mary Sueism that belongs on a fanfic site.

Now, if Jenkins wants to ignore all the retcons that Bendis introduced to the Sentry, I suppose that's his right. I can't claim that the Sentry was made in any way a better character by being made into a drug addict/thief who became repository for the Angel Of Death and serving as an easily controlled lapdog for Norman Osborn.

But then again, this book has a banner at the top billing it as Siege: Epilogue. So you'd think that some editor or such would try to have Jenkins at least give lip service to the events of Siege, right?

Wrong. The events of Siege aren't mentioned at all. Reed Richards off-handedly mentions that Thor "had no choice." He couldn't even say that Thor killed the Sentry. And that's it. There is zero mention that Sentry ripped Ares in half, that he killed Loki, that he destroyed Asgard, that he tried to kill all of the Avengers, that he had become a docile servant of evil. Hell, the vast majority of the people at the graveside service weren't even involved in Siege.

So really, if Paul Jenkins is going to pretend that the events of Siege never happened, what's the point of this exercise? What's the point of branding it part of Siege? What's the point of eulogizing this "fallen sun" if we're not even going to mention the circumstances of his fall and death??

The point is Mary Sueism. As our heroes give tribute to Sentry, Paul Jenkins tells us that the hero he created enabled Tony Stark to get over his alcoholism. That the hero he created was a "better man" than Ben Grimm, who taught the Thing how to be a true hero. That the hero he created enabled Daredevil to survive his "difficult times." That the hero he created was the only one who had been able to touch Rogue, and had been her lover (despite the fact that he had to have been married at that time...). Reed declares that Sentry's "soul burns brighter than others," and that he'll never be able to see the rising sun without thinking of the hero Jenkins created.

Seriously. All that and more is in this issue. Despite everything that happened in the past 5 years under Bendis, the Sentry was the bestest hero ever, who made everyone better, who solved everyone's problem, was the lover of the "unattainable" woman, and was apparently perfection incarnate. Jenkins continues to pound that his creation was better and nobler than everyone else.

You know, maybe that kind of worked, back when the Sentry was a one-off, a somewhat better done version of DC's Triumph. But as a final take on a fallen hero who did some serious damned evil, it's kind of sad and pathetic. Once Sentry became Marvel's Irredeemable, you can't go back to day one--but Jenkins tries to, with a straight face, and without any irony. It's bad when DC does it with Captain Atom and Hal Jordan, and it's bad when Marvel does it--but made worse by his goofy insistence that his character was the bestest ever in the marvel Universe. It's fanfic, and deluded fanfic at that.

Still, it's better than Civil War: Front Line #11.