Every superhero has an origin story, and the Sentry is no exception. Some superheroes get their powers from alien planets or radioactive animals, but many come as a result of intentional government experimentation to produce super soldiers. In the Marvel Universe, many of those projects attempt to produce a Super-Soldier Serum similar to the one that courses through the veins of Captain America, but one super serum is thousands of times stronger than the one the Star-Spangled Avenger took.
The Golden Sentry Serum is the source of the Sentry’s Superman-esque powers, and it is the most powerful super-soldier serum of all time.
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Long before The Falcon and the Winter Soldier made super serums a key plot point, the denizens of the Marvel Universe worked tirelessly to reproduce the miraculous source of Captain America’s powers. Steve Rogers was legendary within the mythos of the world for being one of the only individuals to so successfully adapt the super-soldier process that increased his physical and mental abilities to their most perfect extremes, but in the wake of World War II other scientists would flounder at recreating its results.
The various governmental projects carried various names, with the one which originally produced Captain America known as Project: Rebirth and several subsequent attempts folded into the Weapon Plus program that would later enhance Wolverine. One project that branched off of this was Project: Sentry, which in 1947 used scientists from Canada’s Weapon X program and Nazi scientists to not only recreate the Super-Soldier Serum, but to magnify its effects. The program became drastically fragmented over the course of the Cold War, but in the wake of its ultimate success, its creators would destroy everything they had achieved.
While Captain America may have been the perfect all-American hero, Robert Reynolds was not. As a drug addict looking for his next high, Reynolds broke into a laboratory that held the only sample of the Golden Sentry Serum and drank it, as detailed in 2010’s Dark Avengers #13, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato, Jr. Rather than merely boosting his physical abilities, the serum contained within Reynolds an interdimensional force with the power of a million explosing suns which remade its host into one of the most powerful being on the planet. Sentry was so powerful that the alter ego the Void manifested as a counterbalance.
Various means were used over time to control the Sentry, including fooling him into believing he required further doses of the serum. But the truth was that any means of attempting to controlling the Sentry was imperfect because the raw power he wielded and his mental instability made him an unpredictable force of destruction. While other attempts at super-soldier creation such as the Winter Soldier and the Black Widows produced by the Red Room could be considered far more useful for their obedience, there is no denying that Sentry’s star-consuming level of power is far greater than any other super soldier in the Marvel Universe.
With everyone involved with the serum horrified by what it could do Project: Sentry’s personnel agreed it was better to destroy it. Given how Sentry murdered various superhumans like Carnage and Ares, eradicated Asgard when it was brought to Earth, and very nearly destroyed New York City and the world itself, it’s hard to argue with their reasoning. One Sentry is enough, and if the serum that created him was ever recreated, the Marvel Universe could be in big trouble.
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