Sentry / The Void #1

History

The Sentry concept originated with writer Paul Jenkins, who had unsuccessfully pitched the character to both DC and Marvel multiple times before winning an Eisner Award with artist Jae Lee for their Marvel Knights Inhumans series; riding that success, Jenkins and Lee pitched the Sentry again and editors Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti greenlit it for the Marvel Knights imprint. Rick Veitch contributed early conceptual work — including the idea of weaving the Sentry retroactively into Marvel history across multiple artistic eras — though the extent of his creative credit has been disputed publicly by Jenkins. As a deliberate marketing strategy, Marvel presented the character as a rediscovered Stan Lee creation from the 1950s, complete with a fictitious co-creator named 'Artie Rosen' (a name Jenkins constructed from the names of real Silver Age letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen), and even had Wizard Magazine run a fake obituary for Rosen; Sentry/The Void #1, titled 'The Truth,' was edited by Stuart Moore under editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, with colors by José Villarrubia, and was published on-sale in January 2001 with a February 2001 cover date.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published as a standalone one-shot under the Marvel Knights imprint, cover-dated February 2001 (on-sale January 2001), written by Paul Jenkins and drawn and inked by Jae Lee, with colors by José Villarrubia and lettering by John Roshell.
• The story is titled 'The Truth' and delivers the central twist of the entire Sentry saga: the Void is not an external enemy but a dark alter-ego projected by Robert Reynolds himself — two halves of the same superpowered being.
• The resolution involves the Void attacking the East Coast (including causing damage at the George Washington Bridge), prompting Mr. Fantastic to publicly brand the Sentry a traitor so that a mass hypnotic transmission via C.L.O.C. can erase the world's memories of both the Sentry and the Void — with Mr. Fantastic even sending himself false information framing the event as a temporal anomaly.
• The issue brings together an unusually large cast of the Marvel Universe's major hero groups: the Avengers (Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, Wasp, Triathlon), the Fantastic Four (Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, The Thing), plus the Hulk, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Namor, Doc Samson, and others.
• This one-shot concludes the narrative sequence that began with Sentry #1–5 (2000) and ran through the companion one-shots Sentry/Fantastic Four, Sentry/X-Men, Sentry/Spider-Man, and Sentry/Hulk — making it the final chapter of Jenkins and Lee's complete original story.
• The issue was promptly reprinted in The Sentry trade paperback collection (October 2001) and has since been collected multiple times, including in The Sentry [Fourth Edition] trade paperback (2025) and the comprehensive Sentry Omnibus (2026), which gathers the complete publication history of the character.
• The Sentry and the Void as characters — whose full duality is first explicitly confirmed in this one-shot — went on to appear in the MCU film Thunderbolts* (2025), with Robert Reynolds portrayed by Lewis Pullman.
• The elaborate 'Artie Rosen' marketing hoax, which framed the Sentry as a lost Stan Lee Silver Age creation complete with a fake obituary published by Wizard Magazine, is referenced within the series' fictional framework and reaches its narrative conclusion with this issue's title ('The Truth').

Cast · 38 characters

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