AGE OF SENTRY #1 (OF 6)

Review by: Jim Mroczkowski

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Size: pages
Price: 2.99

There was no warehouse fire, you understand. The Library of Congress is still standing.

If you want a Silver Age or Golden Age book with straightforward, corny storytelling and crayon box coloring populated by aw-shucks simpletons, you can get your hands on actual Silver Age or Golden Age books. It’s not even hard. They reprint them all the time. There is no need, none whatsoever, to foist this cutesy-poo kitschy wink-wink garbage on the marketplace. This “Grindhouse” school of thought, where we spend $70 million to make a movie look and sound like a crappy older movie that’s been kept in the garage since 1971– a movie which you haven’t seen and could easily just go watch– is a goddamned blight on the culture.

You’ve read everything Ditko ever worked on? You’ve finished every issue of the Flash from 1957?

Well, go read ’em again. Trees are getting cut down for this detritus.

On goes the never-ending campaign to manufacture relevance for the least essential character created in the last 10 years! Jam jam jam goes history’s shoehorn, violently wedging this featureless glob of chewed up Wonder Bread into a past where he never was and doesn’t belong! Again we bask in manufactured nostalgia for a time we did not even experience in the first place! Tune in next issue, when it is revealed that the Sentry is the one who irradiated the spider!

How long? How long must we sing this song?

Giving someone money for this product helps, in its own small way, to make the world a worse place to live in.

Story: 1 - Poor
Art: 1 - Poor

Comments

  1. You pan things with too much charisma, Jimski.

    I’m more interested in this book than I was before I knew you hated it.

    Feel free to say you told me so in a few hours.

  2. Yeah I have to agree with Jimski on this. I tried it at my shop, maybe even wanting to buy it….But I flipped threw it and read it closely, and it was nothing special. Maybe double 1’s are too harsh, I’d probably give it a 2 for writing and a 2 for art….It isnt terrible, but this was nothing to get your hopes up that Sentry was gonna be a good character.

  3. I don’t mind the nostalgia/homage/retro aspect.  As long as they’re doing something interesting with it.  

    This was just useless.  The device lends nothing to the larger Sentry story.  There’s no hook here to give this any value.  Big waste.   

  4. Bring it, Jim! You’re everything I want to be.

  5. So it doesn’t capture the cleverness of some of the Escapist faux-retro stories?  THat’s too bad.  How was Marvel Apes?

  6. My level of shock at this review = -0

  7. HOW CAN YOU HATE THIS?   IT HAD A FLYING CORGI.  YOU ARE DEAD TO ME?

    Umm, I mean, what an interesting variety of opinionation the funny books breed.

    (I thought it was negligible, but cute).
     

  8. My fake indignation would be more convincing if I could punctuate it properly.

    YOU ARE DEAD TO ME!

    Only, not really, because I was kidding.

  9. Indeed! And Supergirl had an inteligent flying horse named Comet, in comics that were actually written in 1962, instead of being a half-assed pastiche starring Marvel’s Supergirl. Er, I mean Super– no, wait, I mean Supergirl.

  10. ZING!

    Take that Sentry.  If possible I am now going to not buy this even more than previously planned.

  11. Jimski – you were being unduly harsh, but the truth of the matter is that this book was not good. Silver Age books were rarely this corny and simplistic. This book is supposed to be contemporary with early FF and Spider-Man. At that point, the FF were fighting Silver Surfer and Galactus, and Spider-Man was dealing with the likes of the Vulture, Lizard, and Green Goblin.

    I was never a Sentry hater, but I am starting to get sick of him. It’s almost as though Marvel created the Sentry out of Superman envy. Now they are manufacturing Ersatz Silver-Age books to ridicule Silver-Age Superman. 

  12. i liked this book. it was fun. some of the lines in it were pretty funny. i thought the first story did a good job with the whole retro thing. i was just reading the atom showcase reprint volume the other night and it lined up very nicely with the stories from 1964.

     

  13. Fantastic review.  Now the real question that I find myself asking is: Was this a poor concept, or poor execution?  I actually like the idea of creating new characters this way.  I mean, if a new character pops up, should his story always start ‘now’?  Couldn’t we find a character in media res and find out that he’s live in this world for a long time without us finding out about him?  Isn’t the problem here that the Sentry sucks with the suck of a 1000 sucking suns and not that we would never want to read a new old story? 

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