Dan Simmons -- Hyperion Cantos, Ilium/Olympos .... I only wish he wrote more often, but the quality on a per book basis is without peer imho.
Others: Steven Erikson -- The Malazan Book of the Fallen series George RR Martin -- Song of Ice and Fire series Stephen King -- various Frank Herbert -- Dune Books Glen Cook -- The Black Company series Kurt Vonnegut -- various
To me, Sentry is Marvel's critique of/homage to Superman and sometimes I think Marvel is even poking a little good-natured fun at Superman through the Sentry.
I'm mostly a Marvel fan but I picked up a few of G.Morrison's JLA trades a few weeks ago and have noticed a common element in many of the stories is that while the rest of the League is desperately fighting the villain(s) during the heart of the story Superman has usually been removed from the battle early on for various reasons (plot devices). He's either held prisoner with Kryptonite, someone temporarily sucks the yellow solar energy from his cells, psionically/magically disables him, etc etc. I seem to recall one where the stated reason he couldn't help the rest of the JLA in a desperate battle was because he wanted to stay at the Watchtower and monitor the global situation due to several crises developing at the same time.... because you always want the most powerful guy on the planet manning the phones and watching CNN on the moon when the world is falling apart, I guess. There almost always seems to be a reason he can't go 100% until the story is almost finished because he is so powerful that once he turns his full attention to the problem at hand he can take care of it himself in about 5 panels. "Oh, I just had to hit the villain a little harder than I did in the previous issue. I should have thought of that before all those people got killed. Oops!" (I realize this is true to some extent in all superhero comics and I don't mention this as a sign of disrespect for Supes/JLA/DC but I had not read much JLA so I found it interesting and a little amusing.)
The key difference between the two is the Sentry is his own self-defeating plot device by virtue of being a complete headcase. You never know which Sentry is going to show up: the Sentry that can bitchslap a Herald of Galactus, the one who swiftly flies Carnage into space and rips him in half or the one who runs away from an easy fight because a shadow across the street kinda reminds him of the Void. Or maybe he just stays home to take bong rips and watch Simpsons reruns instead of destroying a Skrull invasion fleet because he felt 'the sky was just too big to go outside today'. I like the Sentry, but they have been doing this stuff for way too long without having some sort of Major Advancement in his personal story. (One of the reasons I like Dark Avengers so much is that we are finally getting many hints that something Big is going to be revealed or happen to the Sentry character at some point in this title. Hopefully this amounts to more than just the repetitive, unexplained reincarnations that we have seen so far.)
Kill himself in the blast.... oh wait... is he immune to his own power? I know he and Scott are immune to each others' power (or they were in the 80s anyway), is Havok immune to his own blasts as well?
Even if he is immune to his own attack blast I still think Iron Man would win, just not as easily as I first thought.
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