Thunderbolts*’ mysterious ‘Bob’ is Marvel’s own dark Superman

A new trailer for Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* may not have revealed why there’s an asterisk in the title — bracing for a Dark Avengers reveal at the end — but it did tease an unexpected addition to the team: Bob.

Who is Bob? Bob’s a guy in hospital scrubs who just happens to be on a team exclusively populated by trained assassins, perfect soldier program rejects, and accidents of science who turned to super crime, all kitted out to the nines with super tech. Which, by the laws of all good Dirty Dozen-style narrative set ups, means he’s must be the most terrifying guy here.

A quick shot of an iconic belt buckle from later in the trailer (and confirmation from Deadline in July), all but confirms his identity: Bob, played by Lewis Pullman (Outer Range, Top Gun: Maverick), is the MCU version of one of Marvel’s most powerful and least stable superheroes.

There’s only one Marvel superhero who wears a big S on his belt, goes by “Bob,” and wouldn’t be unusual to see in the institutional garb of a mental patient, and that’s the Sentry.

Created by writer Paul Jenkins and artist Jae Lee in 2000’s Sentry miniseries for Marvel’s mature-fare imprint, Marvel Knights, Robert Reynolds wields cosmos-shaking power as the superhero known as the Sentry. Following an encounter with one of the world’s innumerable attempts to reproduce Steve Rogers’ super soldier serum, he gained Superman-like powers — including immense strength, speed, flight, invulnerability, enhanced senses, and solar energy absorption — and some extras, like molecular manipulation and mind manipulation.

His heroic adventures as the Sentry began even before the appearance of the Fantastic Four, and he was fast friends with the Avengers, Spider-Man, and basically everybody else on the good side of the Marvel universe. That is, until he realized that he was linked with an equally powerful and correspondingly evil entity known as the Void, and the only way to nullify it was to stop using his powers and make everyone in the universe forget that the Sentry had ever existed.

That was the story, at least, until 2004’s New Avengers, from writer Brian Michael Bendis and various artists, when the character was given a very post-9/11 twist: Supervillains had mucked with Reynolds’ mind to make him believe he had to stop being a superhero, and the awesome power of his subconscious psychic abilities had made the lie real. Since then, comics have gone back and forth with reveals and retcons, tweaking and changing who exactly Robert Reynolds, the Sentry, and the Void are.

Did the Sentry make everyone forget him in order to counteract the Void and live as a normal man? Is the Void a mirror entity to the Sentry’s powers, or Reynolds’ own alternate personality, as expressed with the Sentry’s powers? Is it a manifestation of Reynolds’ fear of his misusing his abilities, brought to reality by his own psychic strength? Or was that fear itself implanted in Reynolds by a supervillain in order to destroy him and all memories of him?

Thunderbolts* has all of these explanations to choose from, on top of simply inventing their own bespoke version of the Void/Sentry/Robert dynamic. The only real throughline with the character is that he’s a supremely powerful Superman analogue called the Sentry, whose presence attracts an equally powerful evil entity called the Void, which, itself, may or may not be a product of Reynolds’ fragile psyche.

Does this mean the ultimate villain opposing the Thunderbolts will be the Void? Hopefully not, because that’s exactly the plot of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, just swapping out the Sentry for the similar “I’ve got an evil entity inside me” character of the Enchantress.

But either way, we’ll find out on May 2, 2025, when Thunderbolts* (or whatever it’s called after we find out what the asterisk means) hits theaters.