Sentinels #5: Winners, Losers and Survivors

All is terrible that ends terrible. This book has been about broken people choosing to do terrible things to try and get back control over their lives and instead they completely lose control over their lives. You can’t embrace evil to fix yourself and a whole bunch of our cast learn this lesson hard from Lockstep to Trask, the high cost’s include one of them their lives and the other becomes a gibbering psychic prophet (hat’s off to the X-Office for that tease). The sentinel program falls apart as Ellis and her cohorts make her move, meanwhile Drumfire confronts the reasons for seeing Onslaught all the time as we get a little Chuck Xavier thrown in for good measure while

Alex Paknadel and the rest of the creative team also deliver on the legacy of Juston Seyfert and the idea of the seyfert strain of sentinel, who ultimately offers Drumfire and Sawtooth a chance at being something new and the open ended moment which sees a new type of sentinel being born involving the three of them. They win nothing but they do get to live another day. Perhaps the idea will make it’s way into the rest of the current era, perhaps it won’t but that doesn’t stop Paknadel from dangling that thread for someone to pick up in the future.

The only real winner are the bad guys here, Warden Ellis gets exactly what she wants. That feels right for a book that had no good guys to begin with. It’s pulled off with suitable aplomb and while it’s very hard to sympathize with anyone except maybe Lockstep’s son Kevin at the loss of his father, the book doesn’t try preach but rather draws you in with the lessons it’s characters learn the hard way.

Mason and Blee finish it off with a violent and graphic flourish in an issue that’s got violence galore but also gives Mason a chance to show off some really cool concepts like Xavier hitting Drumfire with a less than delicate psychic information dump, and there’s a fantastic moment with a Mark I sentinel showing up at just the right moment. It’s a dirty ugly, violent ending of a book that couldn’t ask for abetter suited art team who are wonderfully up to the task and who clearly put everything into this series to make it without a doubt one of the best series of the current era to date, and certainly the best mini to date. Travis Lanham fantastic on letters and has been the whole series. I’m almost sad to see it end, but stories like this have to have endings and as endings go this one was damn near perfect.