In mid-1969, following Arnold Drake’s run on X-Men, fomer X-writer Roy Thomas returned to his old stomping ground. This time, though, it was with a new artist: Neal Adams. They kicked off with a three-issue arc about the return of the Sentinels. Turning the pages as part of my Silver Age reread, I can’t help thinking it’s not as awesome as it was back in the day.
Not that it’s bad, or that I’m more conscious of weaknesses than I was as a kid (unlike say, the wedding of Hank and Janet Pym). Nor does knowing how many other killer robots had already appeared in the 1969 MU. The art is, of course, awesome and I think the three-parter is a solid story.
When Bolivar Trask first created the Sentinels, they went rogue (as fictional robots and computers invariably did back then) and tried to conquer the world. Realizing his mistake, Trask gave his life to help the X-Men destroy them. His son Larry is convinced his father was a genius (he was, but as Professor X noted, he was a bad roboticist) who couldn’t have built rogue robots, ergo the X-Men killed him!
Now Larry has reactivated the Sentinels, with government backing, to capture and cage all mutants. Where his father acted from what he thought was necessity — stop mutants or they’ll become a literal master race — Larry truly hates them. And he has government backing for his crusade, and Sentinels more powerful than ever before (to his credit, he’s also ironed out the kinks — unlike his father’s robots, these ones do their duty).
That’s a heck of a set-up. The Sentinels, when they first appeared, were incredibly powerful foes. They were the first, and at this point 
the only adversaries to specifically target the X-Men for being mutants. And to have the government on Trask’s side as well? In the words of The Muppet Movie, this is a manuscript of heavy duty proportions. Roy Thomas’s earlier work in the series was a mixed bag; he’s upped his game here, whether because he’s more experienced, because of collaborating with Adams or both.
The execution delivers on the set-up, though the third issue resolution has a touch of the absurd: Scott tells the Sentinels that as long as life exists it will mutate so the only way to destroy mutants is to destroy the sun. Off they go into space on a suicide mission.
While I think the story would work for someone reading it for the first time now, I can’t imagine it has the same impact. At the time of X-Men #57, the Sentinels had been destroyed slightly over 40 issues ago, making their return a surprise. When I read it in 1976’s Giant-Size X-Men #2 there had only been three Sentinel stories, the giant robots having returned a few years earlier to battle the Avengers.
(Covers by Gil Kane, above, and Rich Buckler on Avengers). Having been seen so rarely made the Sentinels seem even more impressive and intimidating. They weren’t everyday foes, they were potential world-beaters. The idea of the government moving against mutants was shocking too (not implausible, but shocking). Now, though? The Sentinels seem to be everywhere, all the time. The government has been harassing mutants since the 1980s (our time). At best I imagine the trilogy reads like a good execution of a familiar theme.
Fans have talked a lot over the years about how everyone’s power levels ratchet up over time. The flip side of that is that stuff that once looked extraordinary gradually becomes mundane.
When Reed Richards first discovered the Negative Zone (known back then as sub-space), it was so terrifyingly dangerous that entering that dimension was a suicide mission. In Civil War, Reed’s building prisons there.
When R’as al Ghul first entered the Lazarus Pit and “The Demon Lives Again,’ it was startling — the man on that Neal Adams cover could actually cheat death! In the 21st century, having a Lazarus Pit in your backyard is no more remarkable than a swimming pool. And death in the DCU is a joke.
I suspect being told “The Sentinels Live” sounds equally unremarkable.
#SFWApro.
If memory serves I first came across this story line in one of those British hardback annuals that they used to put out.
I didn’t like it then and don’t like it any better now, it must be the only work of Adam’s that I haven’t enjoyed
The principle happens a lot in comics; ‘if people like thing X, what will they like more than thing X? Lots of thing X!’
They don’t get that sometimes people like something because it’s rare
Very true, and a hard temptation to resist.
As someone who’s been an X-Men fan since 91 and read this story along with the rest of the Thomas/Adams run three years ago, I was impressed. Like you said the Sentinels are old hat by now and are just punching bags for the X-Men so I actually liked reading a story where the Sentinels felt like a legitimate threat. Of course Adams amazing artwork didn’t hurt either.
He was good to start with and I think he’s improved from there. Maybe it’s the Marvel method but his X-artwork is way cooler than his B&B stuff (and I like his B&B a lot).
I first saw it in GS X-Men #2, when it was on the stands. It was my first exposure to the team and I had no idea who anyone was; but I knew it was cool. It didn’t help that it didn’t reprint the lead in story, with the Living Pharoah, since the Sentinels weren’t in that issue. I just kind of rode out the story. It felt epic, that was for sure. I thought Cyclop’s power came from the visor and that Quicksilver donned it, to destroy Dentinels, not recognizing that the X-Men (Scott, Jean and Hank) had replaced Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and The Toad and caught the Sentinels off guard. Loved Adams’ art and all the characters, even if I didn’t know who they were. Just seeing them captured by sentinels made the robots a big deal. Everybody was going down to them! That has always been part of what’s missing in later stories; that sense that they might be invincible.
What confused me even more was the ad, at the end, for the revived regular series, which was talking about one of the team dying. Cyclops was the only one from the story, but he looked different (Dave Cockrum redesigned the visor, gave him more flamboyant buccaneer boots and beefed him up a little. it was a a year or two later that I finally got to see some of that, since my cousin had a handful of those early issues, like the fight with the demon, or the arrival of Eric the Red and the brainwashing of Havok & Polaris, and the return of Magneto, after Eric the Red restores him to his proper age and power. Heck of a time for that book, as you watched a legend be built. To me, it all started with that Sentinels storyline. I didn’t see the Savage Land stuff that followed, until the 80s, with the Baxter format reprint. All I knew, was what got summarized in X-Men #138, when Scott recalls their history, at Jean’s funeral. That issue gave me more background on the series than anything, at that point, in the days before you had a bunch of reference books or various reprints or the internet.
Kids These Days have no idea how hard it was to learn that stuff. As I mentioned a couple of years back, JLA 37-38 including recaps of some of the JLA’s origins was mesmerizing to me as a kid.