This Is About The Nicest I Can Be When It Comes To The Sentry

So, I hear the Sentry died in Siege this week. Nicest

Audience: Yeah, woohoo, *whistling, enthusiastic clapping*

Course, he'll probably be resurrected in a couple of years.

Audience: Boo! Hiss! Get outta here with that, you goombah!

"Goombah"? Then before we could truly enjoy being rid of him, Marvel released Sentry: Fallen Sun, where all Marvel's heroes (except the cosmic ones, because they have important work to do) gather to talk about how wonderful and special the Sentry was to them. Including Rogue, as it's revealed the Sentry was the first person she was physically intimate with.

Audience: Oh come on! Seriously?! *assorted groans*

The Rogue thing seems like all kinds of a bad idea, especially just tossing it in there as some throwaway piece to once again demonstrate how much the Sentry means to everyone. Was it supposed to make readers like Bob more? "See, he was so important to Rogue, she's crying! Doesn't that make you like him?" I think the answer to that would be a resounding "No!" In fact, what say we all agree that never happened? Really, the X-Men weren't even at the memorial service. Nope, much too busy trying to save Hope and mourn Nightcrawler (a character who actually merits mourning, even if, as an X-Person, he'll probably be back soon enough.)

I'd like to think within the issue, there was one character at least thinking, if not saying it aloud "We are so much better off with him dead." I know, one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but I think it'd be fair. Bob was off his rocker, and insanely powerful. He could bring people back to life without even realizing it, which is terrifying when you realize that means he could do the opposite just as easily. He certainly had the power, but he didn't seem to have the mentality to handle being a hero. Some folks just aren't cut out for the heroic life, and so maybe the most responsible thing they can do with their power is not use it. The more he saved the day, the closer he moved to the point where he was the problem.

In the one and only D & D campaign I took part in, we had a goblin shaman with a wishing orb. It came in handy when one of our party would be so thoroughly killed there was nothing left of him to resurrect (happened more often than you might think). Partway through the story, we did something that disrupted the orb's connection to the goblin's gods, which meant now every time he used it, there was a chance it would explode, probably killing us all. The chance increased every time he used it. Still, the folks in the party had the goblin using the orb regularly, even for stuff we could do otherwise. Our top fighter lost their super-awesome sword at the bottom of the bay when our ship was struck by a meteor. We could have grabbed a rowboat, rowed out there, I'd cast a spell to allow breathing underwater, and the meat shield swims down and grabs his sword. Would have taken longer, but there's no risk of lethal explosion.

The Sentry makes life easier, since he can smack down Terrax in under a minute, but using him only brings them closer to the point where the Void's on the loose, and that's worse than Terrax. Better to keep the Sentry gone (or buried in Bob's mind, or whatever), and find another way, which the heroes in the Marvel Universe had done for years anyway. I mean, wasn't that part of the point of his first mini-series, the Marvel Universe doesn't need a Silver Age Superman, it'll chug along just fine without him?

So maybe it would have been better to have one of the Avengers or the FF point out, "You know, we really should have left Bob alone. Being the Sentry wasn't good for him, and we should have been more aware of it." Would it have made a difference? I really don't know, largely because I'm still not clear on the whole deal with Bob/Void/Sentry. I don't see how it could have hurt, though.