Sentinel Vol. 2: No Hero, and the importance of stories

As a kid, my older cousins collected Marvel comics. I didn't ever really collect them, only ever admiring them from afar. They had the first few volumes of the original Runaways, and because I looked up to them a lot, I decided to start my own collection. I went to a street vendor selling some volumes of mismatched and scattered Marvel runs and picked up Marc Sumerak's Machine Teen and Sean McKeever's Sentinel  Vol 2.

For the longest time, this was the extent of the world of comics for me; I was quite a frugal child growing up and never really went out of my way to buy anything for myself. Soon, comics kind of faded into the background amid all the other things I had going on in my life. But that's not to say I didn't appreciate this series. The art style and writing were so formative to my 8-year-old self that I always assumed that this series was part of a large canon in Marvel, and that Juston Seyfert or A.D.A.M. from Machine Teen were main players in some version of the Avengers or something. I scrawled crude sketches of the Sentinel, imagined Juston grown up and becoming greater and stronger and more renowned.

Revisiting this series, (especially as someone who had only read the second volume and not the issues that had come before) was an eye-opener. To know that this ending was pretty much intended to be an open-ended one in response to a series cancellation shocked me. The writing in the second volume comes across as so natural and well-paced, but the first volume seemed somewhat odd and jilted. It seems cruel to cancel a series just when the writing and art had hit their stride. 

But through this, I kind of have a new appreciation for shorter runs of comics? I remember reading and rereading my two volumes of comics over and over again til the binding wore out. My initial framing of a small run as something huge in my mind when I was young highlights the importance writers can have even in a single page. Minor characters become major ones, and the smallest interactions matter in making a world feel lived in and homely.   

All the stories we tell do leave impacts on others, even if it doesn't seem like it.