THE CREATORS: Sean McKeever and Udon

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2003: Juston Seyfert discovers a Sentinel, rebuilds it, and uses it to make himself look good at school.  Which backfires badly.  Then he helps out with a plane crash.

I mentioned earlier that the Tsunami line had produced four relatively successful titles, of which three were X-books.  Unfortunately, there were four X-related Tsunami titles, and the unlucky fourth was Sentinel.

Writer Sean McKeever produced two titles for Tsunami - Sentinel and Inhumans - both of which got fairly good reviews.  Unfortunately, both also got cancelled within a year after rather dismal sales.  Of course, Sentinel is so detached from the rest of the X-universe that it barely qualifies as an X-book at all.  It involves a kid in Wisconsin finding a broken Sentinel and repairing it.  This might explain why it hasn't met with quite the success of the other new X-books.

It's a shame, as Sentinel might possibly have been a project that stood a chance in the bookstores - at least, if it was properly packaged.  There's still a plan to do some kind of digest version for that audience, so you never know.  But it now looks like an abandoned project which is being cannibalised as a format experiment.

Despite the titular giant robot, Sentinel is basically a high school drama.  The robot lies in a shed for the first few issues, being steadily rebuilt from junk, while lead character Juston Seyfert goes about his teen issues.  Admittedly, the book doesn't have a desperately original approach to school drama - there are bullies!  There are shallow cheerleaders!  Then again, the end of the first arc played neatly off the occasional Columbine mentions while staying far enough away to avoid obviousness, and provided an interesting set-up for the series.

The second arc, involving a rescue of a downed aircraft, wasn't particularly involving.  That's probably because it left the supporting cast behind to focus on Juston and the robot.  The final arc, leading up to cancellation with issue #12, seems to be getting more on track.

Udon have opted for a cartoony approach to the art - I'm sure it's no coincidence that everyone seems to have a wardrobe consisting entirely of the same clothes in different colours.  With the humans, it's been very successful.  With the robot, perhaps less so - the story has it being constructed out of junk, and it's never looked remotely like something that could have been made that way.  How much purple metal does Juston have in that scrapyard of his?

A brave try, anyway.

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