A Replacement For The Sentry??

OK, so just about everybody hated the Sentry, at least as applied by Marvel--the hero who never really existed, but was jammed like a square peg into the round hole of Marvel's continuity.

Yeah, the idea of a long-lost Stan Lee character was vaguely clever. But the clumsy execution--he was Hulk's best friend!! He was Reed's best friend!! He taught Tony Stark to stop drinking!!--and Marvel's refusal to let the concept remain a cute one-off mini-series basically led to large chunks of fandom really, really really despising the character.

Well, he's dead now (for awhile, at least). So what are we gonna do for Silver Age character-insertion based retcons?

Well, I've got an answer. Instead of a fictional "lost Stan Lee character," how about an actual lost Roy Thomas character?!?

Marvel Super-Heroes was a giant-sized anthology title--every issue featured a full-length original lead story (Captain Marvel, Doctor Doom, Black Knight) and a bunch of reprints in the back. On the last page of issue #20 (1969), we had the following house ad:

Sounds exciting, right? Too bad it never happened. Starting with that next issue, Marvel Super-Heroes went all-reprint. So no Starhawk story, no "mind-bending new concept," no one "blasting his way across two centuries."

Well, that happens. But the odd thing? Even though the story was done, it was never published anywhere. A Roy Thomas script with a (possibly) exciting new character, art by Dan Adkins, even the cover was done:

I'll let other, smarter websites do the detective work here. Apparently somebody at Marvel felt this first story didn't work, and they didn't want to have the character make his debut in a bad light, and so they pulled it to re-draw and re-write it. But that never seems to have happened.

Once again going to a better blog, Rip Jagger's Dojo presents several pages from the unpublished story...go take a look!

So...we have an actual honest-to-gosh "long-lost character" from one of Marvel's early giants, just waiting to have someone revive him (although, obviously, he might need a name change). Here's someone Marvel can go back and retcon into old stories, and he ACTUALLY existed (sort of).

Folks, hop on board the bandwagon, write letters to Joe Quesada, flood the message boards, and let's make Starhawk into the Sentry for the second decade of the 21st century!!

(And this time, make him suck less...)