John Victor Williams, a patient in a mental asylum, has created an elaborate fantasy world in which he’s both the world’s greatest threat: a creature calling itself the Void; and the world’s greatest savior: the hero known as the Sentry. In his fantasy world, John - or, as he calls himself there, Robert - has come to a top-secret facility to discover his true origins, only to discover that the entire life he’s been living is a delusion.

The plot of this penultimate issue of the Sentry miniseries is nothing new, of course; we’ve seen many and various stories about heroes being told that their entire life is a delusion and they’re actually patients in a mental hospital, and not just in comics. (That episode of Buffy was one of the cooler ones, as I recall.) What makes this one different is that writer Paul Jenkins refuses to break the illusion until the absolute last moment, making us think that perhaps the Marvel Universe, from Spider-Man to the FF and everyone in between, is a creation of this John Victor Williams’ own tortured psyche, an aberration that leads him to kill a woman in cold blood. (Ever notice how killers are always called by their full names? That’s probably what’s kept most of us from gleefully killing the people who piss us off the worst, because I know I wouldn’t want my middle name to become widely known.) As an exercise in alternate possibility, the story works exceedingly well.

Until Robert notices something that tells him it’s all a sham, of course - as always happens in these stories. This is giving nothing away, because you’ll know that it’s inevitable that this should happen from page one. Sadly, that’s the one flaw in Jenkins’ script, and it’s a pretty major one, if only because we have read or seen so many stories like this before, and we already know that the hero finds out that the mental hospital he or she is in is the actual illusion and that their reality is indeed real. Thus, when that moment of realization comes, it’s less a shock and more a moment in which we say, "Oh, this again."

This isn’t to say that this one flaw completely ruins the issue, mind you. Once we’re over that hump, the rest of the story ramps the tension back up once again, and Robert gets one step closer to uncovering the hideous truth that the last six issues have been driving towards. And no book featuring the art of John Romita Jr. and Mark Morales, who are both at the height of their game here, could be considered a failure by any means. But given how delightfully surprising this miniseries has been so far, it’s just a pity that that one single moment couldn’t have been as innovative as the rest has been. Even great titles have their bad moments - or, at the very least, their predictable ones. B