Always the Sentry. Ever the Void

I remember the first time the Void entered my heart.

I remember exactly where I was standing - by the pond on the grass strip between our tiny farm cottage and the farmer’s giant house on the hill. Up there, the lights would blaze all night. We could see them from our front window at the bottom of the hill, always a reminder of the great class and wealth divide between British families. My brother and I were allowed to play with the farmer’s children, but we were never invited to their birthday parties. That farm - Parsonage Farm in Kent - employed many of the traveling Romani and Hungarian families, especially in the summer during hop-picking season. And they employed my mother as their house cleaner, as well as my brother and I to pick strawberries in the summer. It is the inspiration for the farm you see in Wolverine: Origin. But that’s a story for another time.

The night the Void first entered my heart I was outside, where a thin sliver of moon was clear in the darkening sky. I was seven years old. A couple of years before, my father had left us, and my Mum had taken my brother and I to stay in the old cottage. Everything was different now. We ate what Mum could get from the farm, and we usually had no electricity. That first winter, the little farm cottage was like a freezer. Baths were taken in a couple of inches of water, boiled in a kettle over an open fire. My bedroom was the attic.

I froze my arse off at night, feet carefully reaching for a hot water bottle that was always scalding until about 2AM. I stared out of the tiny attic window into the vastness of space most nights. In the silence of the British countryside, I listened to owls and foxes outside, the snuffling of hedgehogs and the rustling of badgers, stoats and weasels. But I rarely slept. Because I was terrified, and alone, and the ghosts didn’t like me.

And my Mum, well… there’s a story. One of the most unique human beings you will ever encounter. The kind of person who is so eccentric - so interesting - that an hour with her is a delight, but a few hours is a challenge and an entire childhood is pure insanity. Mum would take us on adventures, sometimes just hitchhiking around the country with no money and nowhere to stay. And we’d survive, and have such rich memories. But Mum was mostly learning to understand herself, and that was a full time job. She didn’t always have the resources to connect to her boys. She was brilliant, quirky, autistic; bizarre and moody and totally into education as long as she was teaching and you were listening. She had PTSD from being a child of the Blitz and would often wake, screaming, at night. She would sometimes disappear into the ether, and my brother would head to his friends’ houses, and I’d be left alone in that haunted farm cottage at night. I can still hear the hissing of wet wood on the fire, and the creaks of the spirits walking up and down the staircase as I tried to ignore them.

So, yeah, look… I will write about all of this soon enough in this Substack. And when I do, you’ll begin to understand that my career in entertainment has been about less about fawning over Star Wars and Doctor Who, and more about presenting the snapshots of our lives. I’ll show you what shaped so many of these stories. I’ll tell you who I think the Sentry is, and where the Void fits into that equation. Boy, does it ever revolve around those two.

That evening, I was standing out on the grass, looking up into the sky. There was a quince tree next to the pond that always bore a single fruit. The farm goat, Hercules, was usually tied up out there - I liked to spend time with him because his head was hard and he was strong and friendly. To this day, I remember how the moon looked - as thin a fingernail moon as you will ever see. But I was a country kid; I knew why swallows flew high in the summer and I’d learned how to snare rabbits… and my amazing, eccentric mum had taught me about the phases of the moon. In those days, I was obsessed with the moon landings, and with space in general. America seemed as distant and exotic as the lunar surface. I wanted to know about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I loved Michael Collins most of all. The guy who was completely alone, staring out of his little window into space. I knew how that felt, and I wanted him to be safe more than anything in the world. I remember peering into the sky to see if I could pick him out, flying around the fingernail moon. I dreamed that one day he might fly back down to earth and maybe he could be my dad.

Mum was outside that evening, watching me looking at the stars. Being a teacher with no off switch, she decided to tell me a story about a little dog that the Russians had sent into space. The dog’s name was Kudrayavka, but she was known as Laika, the “little barker.” I was immediately obsessed - do you mean they sent a little dog in a rocket ship? And she had a little space helmet, and everything? Yes, of course, replied my mother. And because she was Mum, and because she felt this would be a good lesson for me, she decided to tell me the rest; that the Russians had sent Laika on a one-way trip. That she had never come back. That this poor, defenseless little dog had probably burned up in the atmosphere, or run out of oxygen and suffocated.

And that was the first time the Void entered my heart.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to go into space and bring Laika home. I wanted to save her. But I couldn’t because Laika had died in 1957. I cried for months, and I don’t think I ever got over it. I persuaded myself that if I could just find a rocket ship somewhere - maybe Michael Collins would lend me his - I would go up into space and bring back Laika.

Most - if not all - of you are obsessed with little Punch, the lonely monkey. I know I am. We see this tiny, helpless little soul clutching his toy orangutan and we desperately want to hold him, to soothe him. He has taken on millions of loving caretakers because he is sweet and innocent, and an underdog. Laika was such an underdog. She was two years old, selected because she was so calm and had survived two harsh winters on the Moscow streets. She didn’t ask to be jettisoned into space. The Sputnik 2 technicians kissed her on the nose just before they sent her into the void. I think of how scared she must have been, and how confused as she tumbled in an overheating death trap that killed her within a few hours of liftoff. And now - even these 70 years after her death - I want to find a rocket ship and go into space to save her. She hurts my heart even now.

So, now you know; when you read the first issue of my new Sentry series, you will see the true origin of Bob’s Sentry. He exists because Bob wants to save Laika. Bob wants to save everyone. It’s an impossible task. The Void exists to even things out. The Void is the side of Bob that was always destroyed by the tragedy.