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

Who is Bob? Bob is a man in a hospital scrubs who happens to be on a team made up entirely of trained assassins, perfect soldiers who fail the program, and accidental scientific accidents turned super criminals, all decked out in super technology. Which, by the laws of all good Dirty Dozen-style stories, means he has to be the most terrifying man in the room.

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 (Out of 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, calls himself “Bob,” and is not uncommonly seen in the psychiatric garb of a psychiatric patient, and that’s the Sentry.

Created by writer Paul Jenkins and artist Jae Lee in the 2000s sentry miniseries for Marvel’s adult imprint, Marvel Knights, finds Robert Reynolds wielding cosmos-shaking power as the superhero known as the Sentry. After an encounter with one of the world’s countless attempts to replicate Steve Rogers’ super soldier serum, he gains Superman-like powers — including immense strength, speed, flight, invulnerability, enhanced senses, and the ability to absorb solar energy — along with a few extras, like molecular and mind manipulation.

His heroic adventures as the Sentry began even before the Fantastic Four appeared, and he quickly befriended the Avengers, Spider-Man, and basically everyone on the good side of the Marvel Universe. That is, until he realized that he was connected to an equally powerful and correspondingly evil entity known as the Void, and the only way to destroy it was to stop using his powers and make everyone in the universe forget that the Sentry ever existed.

That was the story, at least, until 2004. New Avengersfrom writer Brian Michael Bendis and several artists, when the character took a very post-9/11 turn: Supervillains had tampered with Reynolds’ mind to make him believe he needed to stop being a superhero, and the awesome power of his subconscious psychic powers had made the lie come true. Since then, comics have gone back and forth with reveals and retcons, tweaking and changing exactly who Robert Reynolds, the Sentry, and the Void are.

Did the Sentry make everyone forget about him in order to counter the Void and live as a normal human? Is the Void a mirror entity of the Sentry’s powers, or Reynolds’ own alternate personality, as expressed of the Sentry’s powers? Is it a manifestation of Reynolds’ fear of misusing his gifts, made real by his own psychic power? Or was that fear itself implanted in Reynolds by a supervillain to destroy him and all memory of him?

Lightning bolts* has all of these explanations to choose from, besides simply coming up with their own bespoke version of the Void/Sentry/Robert dynamic. The only real common thread with the character is that he’s an extremely powerful Superman analogue called the Sentry, whose presence attracts an equally powerful malevolent entity called the Void, who may or may not be a product of Reynolds’ fragile psyche.

Does this mean that the ultimate villain opposing the Thunderbolts will be the Void? Hopefully not, because that’s exactly David Ayers’ plot Suicide Squadby replacing the Sentry with the similar “I have an evil being inside me” character of the Enchantress.

But either way, we’ll find out on May 2, 2025, when Lightning bolts* (or whatever it’s called once we know what the asterisk means) is in theaters.