Making the Sentry 2026 Series

Part One - Pitching the Series

Hello, Chums!

It has been a fantastic week here at stately Jenkins Mansions, with the release of Sentry #1, the imminent release of Captain Marvel #1, and a few cool projects percolating away like a boiling tub of uranium. Fan and critical reaction to the book has been amazing. We’re so grateful for such a positive response.

Many fans have asked me about the process I apply to creating a comic. I think most of you would be quite surprised at the level of effort and detail that goes into making a single comic issue, much less an entire series. It’s not just in the original concepting and writing, it involves rough layouts, pencils, inks, coloring, lettering and editorial. For Marvel, it involves marketing and promotion, and distribution. Retailers must take a gamble on any given title because they have to buy it in order to sell it. I work across almost all media, and I can tell you that comics are probably the most complicated form of writing (with perhaps game writing as its evil twin).

So, for your delight and edification, may I present the giant mess that can loosely be described as “my process.” We’ll start with the concept, from pitch to approved project. Following this, we will get into the ins and outs of comic work in subsequent posts.

Finding the “Why.”

Everything starts here, inside one of my notorious little workbooks. Our house is covered with these things. My Nigh Perfect wife, Lindy, trips over them all the time. We use the old ones as bedding for the hamster (just kidding - they’re all stored in a secret vault). You’ll see that this particular book contains two projects - one, a series I was writing for the late, lamented Komixstream (who went belly up in their first year of existence), and the other, our new Sentry series. I’ll open this workbook in a bit and show you what’s inside.

Now, I can’t speak for any other comic creator, but I won’t allow myself to begin a project unless I can justify to my audience why this is a story worth telling. A story must have a theme, and it must be something that readers will relate to, or at least understand. In the case of Sentry, I find this particularly easy - he struggles with his mental health, and so everyday difficulties are magnified for him. The “why” of our current series - its theme - is, “How do you deal with difficult moments in life if you are already in a vulnerable state?” Every single one of us has had to do this; none of us has flown around the galaxy dressed in golden Spandex, punching bad guys. Unless one of you isn’t telling me something…

The “What” (as in, “What are we going to do?”)

Once I know what I want to say, I must break the story down to fit its format. In this case, I pitched a larger story to begin with - one that would have needed eight to ten issues to complete. But this isn’t necessarily what the market will bear right now, so the folks at Marvel weighed up the various plusses and minuses, and decided we would need to tell an initial story in four issues, to test the market. That’s fine by me. I developed a curriculum that I taught at Kennesaw State University in Georgia called Creative Adaptability; If you tell me the parameters, I can work easily within them. I believe limitation drives creativity, so I am not afraid of deadlines or format changes.

The above screenshot shows some of the preamble I wrote to my editors, so that Marvel would see the meaning behind what I was going to deliver. It helps everyone to understand that I have a plan, and an approach that works for the series. This is still attached to the “why” of it all, I suppose.

This screenshot of that same pitch lifts the veil a little bit. Those of you who are familiar with issue #1 will see that in fact, our first scene was not the Kingpin scene, but the scene inside the Watchtower.

What I’m doing here is building the story out for myself and my editors. They’ll make a few suggestions, and we will tweak a few things. If you’re a big Sentry fan, you’re probably jumping up and down at the mention of Knull. But no… we decided it was not really that helpful to refer to the King in Black series in this story. Instead, as you know, we placed the story at a different moment in Marvel time. That decision has greatly helped us because we aren’t stuck trying to put a bow on someone else’s story. Some of the interactions between Bob and Lindy were also omitted from issue #1.

In the end, the scene-by scene breakdown goes over to my workbook… and that’s when we really get to the creation of the comic.

Here’s a teaser for our next Substack post: this is how the first three pages of Sentry #1 look once I take them from a scene-by-scene breakdown to panel-by-panel breakdowns. All that crumpling you see on the page is because at some point, I will have put about ten cups of tea on top of that poor page.

I’m British. That’s how I roll.

NEXT: From breakdowns to script, and then to rough layouts