Ooh, a new X-book!  Granted, that's in a loose sense, but if I'm counting Exiles and Agent X, then why not?

Sentinel is the first new title to emerge from Marvel's vaguely-defined Tsunami promotion.  It's not an imprint, it's more a, uh, a thing.  With a logo.

The aim of the Tsunami books - or at least, one of the aims, since it's hard to see the Way/Herrera Venom book falling into this description - is to try and produce comics which can appeal to the burgeoning manga readership.  That market has exploded in the last couple of years, to the point where the biggest selling comic in North America this month was probably something like Shonen Jump.  It sells nothing in the direct market, but that's not the point - this is a new comics audience emerging, primarily in the bookstores.  It raises the interesting prospect of the US domestic publishers being more or less swept aside by a wave of imports, and relegated to the irrelevance of the direct market.

Clearly Marvel can't allow that to happen, so we're getting a wave of books such as Sentinel which have a remit to try and appeal to those new readers.  Whether this is best done by using established characters at all is questionable; however, it's important to bear in mind that for these titles, the key test of success is how they do in the trade paperbacks.  If the existing audience likes them and buys them, that's very nice, but it isn't really the point of the exercise.

Sentinel is from the "boy and his robot" genre, although writer Sean McKeever describes it as a "teen fantasy/drama".  Teenager Juston Seyfert discovers a Sentinel control chip left over from... well, something we're not told about yet.  When he starts incorporating it into his Battlebot machinery, you can probably guess what follows.  But there isn't that much of the actual Sentinel in this story.  The focus is on Juston and his schoolmates, setting up the soap opera angles and introducing the cast.

Granted, the themes here are not exactly original - Juston and his friends are bullied by jocks, and one of them is being fairly blatantly set up as the sort of character who's likely to snap.  Some of the ideas here are familiar from McKeever's earlier series The Waiting Place, in which teenagers in the dead-end town of Northern Plains, and generally yearned to get the hell out of there and go somewhere more interesting instead.  This time, the setting is Antigo, Wisconsin (population 50,000, fact fans), but Juston and his love interest Jessie both express a desire to graduate and leave town.

However, while the themes may be somewhat familiar, that doesn't mean they're not worth revisiting - not least, from Marvel's viewpoint, because they don't have any other books doing this sort of thing.  (Incidentally, it says something about the overuse of ideas that this series stands out by having a lead character who has a very happy relationship with his father.  Although admittedly his mother seems to have left them.)

The Udon studio provides art, apparently with Eric Vedder pencilling - though it's hard to extract individual responsibility from their collective credits.  It's a slightly more exaggerated style than they adopted on Agent X, and yes, there are the Japanese-style big eyes everywhere.  But they get the characters over well, and they do well on the technology.

A very promising start.  Is it, strictly, an X-book?  No, it isn't.  The Sentinel, at this stage, is a selling point to get you in the door so that they can do a teen drama comic.  But it's worth taking them up on the offer, because McKeever and Udon produce a great read with believable characters.

Rating: A

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