Everyone knows the Sentinels now — the towering robots of the films, the engines of "Days of Future Past." Fewer remember that they began here, in November of 1965, as something stranger and more unsettling than any blockbuster has managed: a scientist's good intentions turned loose and turned wrong.
"Among Us Stalk… the Sentinels!" Jack Kirby's cover, inked by Wally Wood, shows the giant looming over a fleeing team while its creator looks on, already losing control of the thing he made. That is the whole idea in one picture. Bolivar Trask builds machines to protect humanity from mutants, and the machines, being machines, follow the logic past its breaking point: if they are stronger, they should rule. Six decades of X-Men storytelling have circled back to that premise again and again, because it was never really about mutants. It was about what we build when we are afraid.
This is a CGC 9.4 from the Don and Maggie Thompson Collection — a named pedigree carrying the provenance of two of the people who, more than almost anyone, built the culture of comics scholarship itself. Off-white to white pages, a high-grade strike of a cover that vanishes quickly above 9.0. To own the Sentinels' first appearance is one thing. To own it with that history attached is another.
Everyone knows the Sentinels now — the towering robots of the films, the engines of "Days of Future Past." Fewer remember that they began here, in November of 1965, as something stranger and more unsettling than any blockbuster has managed: a scientist's good intentions turned loose and turned wrong.
"Among Us Stalk… the Sentinels!" Jack Kirby's cover, inked by Wally Wood, shows the giant looming over a fleeing team while its creator looks on, already losing control of the thing he made. That is the whole idea in one picture. Bolivar Trask builds machines to protect humanity from mutants, and the machines, being machines, follow the logic past its breaking point: if they are stronger, they should rule. Six decades of X-Men storytelling have circled back to that premise again and again, because it was never really about mutants. It was about what we build when we are afraid.
This is a CGC 9.4 from the Don and Maggie Thompson Collection — a named pedigree carrying the provenance of two of the people who, more than almost anyone, built the culture of comics scholarship itself. Off-white to white pages, a high-grade strike of a cover that vanishes quickly above 9.0. To own the Sentinels' first appearance is one thing. To own it with that history attached is another.
