tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59726672024-03-24T23:09:48.801-07:00Unstoppable Juggernaut of Funby Matthew Jent, age 36.Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.comBlogger501125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-84211438809117291782015-11-13T00:40:00.000-08:002015-11-13T00:40:26.813-08:00We Are A MirrorI used to write an improv newsletter twice a month.
I used to improvise, on stage, a couple times a week!
I was in a group called Trail Mix that did 3-person monoscenes, a group called Book Club that did hour+ genre narratives, and a group called BLOODCUP that did ... god, I dunno. We wore black outfits and makeup and improvised based on existential dread and raw emotional truths.
I had a Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-75423004808694837642015-09-09T09:00:00.003-07:002015-09-09T09:00:43.868-07:00How I Spent My Summer Vacation
I dressed in black and performed gut-based improv with #BLOODCUP
I drove across the country with my brother
(California to Arizona to New Mexico to Texas to Arkansas to Tennessee to Kentucky to Ohio)
We saw Mad Max in Arkansas
We stopped at a lot of comic book stores and bought $1 comics
He had to get a comic book box to keep all of his new comics in
I stuffed mine in a backpack.
We stopped at Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-55233708063763853192014-07-15T12:16:00.000-07:002014-07-15T12:16:02.508-07:00July Linkery and NEWSWhat I've written this month that lives elsewhere:
Why Almost Everything You Know About Star Wars Is Now Wrong, for KQED Pop, in which we discuss retcons, Star Wars, and ecumenical councils.
Review: Spider-Man 2099 #1 for The Beat, which has long been by NYT of comics news, in which we discuss last century's future superheroes, anti-hero secret identities, and the Spider-Man we deserve.
Which Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-31375819758724906302014-06-27T17:13:00.001-07:002014-06-27T17:13:54.212-07:00A Tale of Years, 5: 1984A hinge point.
Grandpa Mathews passes away. It is my first funeral. Jeff and I lurk under coats. Later, I play that one of my He-Men has died, and the others must attend his funeral. Mom tells me to never, ever, play that someone has died.
Later (or before), I ask what will happen when I die. Mom is folding and putting away sheets and blankets in the closet at the end of the hall. She is busy Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-4593990925303387002014-06-26T18:30:00.002-07:002014-06-26T18:30:50.605-07:00A Tale of Years, 4: 1983Grandma & Grandpa Mathews live on Belfast Road, in a low blue house hidden by trees. It's not properly in the woods -- behind this low blue house is someone else's house, and a barn that sometimes houses a horse -- but it feels like a very Ohio home all the same, with its own yard and hills and valleys and a spring that runs nearby.
It is where my mom spent much of her own childhood. There Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-33868813694905311362014-06-26T12:00:00.003-07:002014-06-26T12:01:09.939-07:00A Tale of Years, 3: 1982The grass come in. The trees always have.
I have winter memories, but those only become clear later on. For now, it's still the summer I think of.
My brother is 12.
My mom and dad are 32 and 32.
The Big Swing. Aluminum frame, painted brown, a long bench-swing made of wood, also painted. I run circles around it -- I literally do this -- as Dad yells to stay away because a wasp lives there Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-70481216454755908142014-06-25T12:54:00.001-07:002014-06-25T12:54:22.470-07:00A Tale of Years, 2: 1981
There's a feeling I still feel today in the Ohio River Valley. It is large and expansive, yet hidden. The hills dip down, the trees reach up. You can be hidden there. Taking in the world, but living unseen and unheard. Later, this feels frustrating. In formative times, it feels like patient safety.
"After the monsoon."
In 1981, I am 2 and my brother is 12.
My mom and dad are Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-32641237956213785582014-06-24T12:39:00.001-07:002014-06-24T12:39:22.138-07:00A Tale of Years, 1: 1980Memory is tricky, trickful, and slippery.
I remember Grover. I remember the bars on this bed. I remember later, when the walls are painted blue, which means I remember that they used to be white. I remember Grover falling out of the bed, just out of my reach, and crying and screaming for his return.
Fount from which I sprang.
Matthew, Fry, Cox, Mathews.
I remember the brown Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-42122054503445515622014-06-23T18:03:00.000-07:002014-06-23T18:37:35.390-07:00A Tale of Years, prologue: 1979I don't remember it, not a single bit.
Mom & Matt, in the wilds of Ohio.
The house on Weaver Road is finished. Ranch-style, on an acre of land that used to be part of Pa's farm. Three bedrooms and one bathroom. A basement of concrete. A sunken family room with a fireplace. Gravel driveway. Trees in the back, fields on either side. My brother turns 10. My mom and dad turn Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-76784081727215777842014-06-21T12:37:00.002-07:002014-06-21T12:37:34.559-07:00The HideoutYou had to drive to it. In Chicago! In 2004! How was I supposed to feel about that?
It had a porch. It had a front room with a bar and low ceilings and yellow christmas lights strung up year round. It was made of wood. It was low-lit, but comfortable.
It was a hideout.
The back room -- through a narrow chokepoint of pillars and bathroom doors and stacks of mysterious boxes -- was where the Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-77885974907719296952014-05-31T16:42:00.002-07:002014-05-31T16:42:48.692-07:00Review: Avengers World #6
I read somewhere, somewhen, that Avengers World was telling strong, single-issue stories set in the current continuity of the Marvel Universe. This was a thing I wanted in my life! So on my latest trip to the comics shop to load up on dollar bin books (filling in a nice chunk of late-80s Uncanny X-Mens), I picked up Avengers World #6, featuring on its cover someone who was either Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-75797412041428511302014-05-28T13:47:00.000-07:002014-05-28T13:47:46.744-07:00Review: Saga, chapter nineteen
The cover of the new issue of Saga says "Chapter Nineteen," but in the hands of any other publisher, this would be the first issue of volume two. This would be a reboot or a new season or a bold new direction. This is a new status quo, with parents Alana and Marko hiding out instead of on the run. Consider, also, the first respective pages of chapters one and nineteen:
But Saga is Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-29230681237711300522014-05-12T13:19:00.002-07:002014-05-12T13:19:29.019-07:00Review: Shutter #1
The first thing I like about Shutter: it starts on the inside front-cover. It's a great visual, and it uses the comics form in a natural and fun way. Astronauts! Moon-running!
The second thing I like: the credits, running mid-page across the first several pages, all Wes Anderson-like, giving us tour of the wallways of the Kristopher family. They're explorers and have been for generations, Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-51815514156620796642014-05-02T13:46:00.001-07:002014-05-02T14:06:42.481-07:00Dollar Bin Reviews: Magik #4Magik #4: “Darkchild”
My first comic book crush was Illyana Rasputin, code-named Magik, little sister to Colossus of the X-Men and member of the New Mutants training team.
Illyana was Russian, blonde with harsh bangs, and could teleport herself and her friends across vast distances with “stepping discs” that used an otherdimensional Limbo as a shortcut. But like Wolverine, it wasn’t her Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-55821805259432630942014-04-29T17:14:00.000-07:002014-04-29T18:40:01.714-07:00Dollar Bin Reviews: West Coast Avengers #2
The West Coast Avengers #2, titled “Sons,” wasn’t picked up from a dollar bin, though I’ve certainly seen it there. I bought it, no doubt, at Waldenbooks at the Eastgate Mall in southwestern Ohio, when I was six and visiting the mall with my mother and my brother. That’s where I got all of my comics in that period of time, and I chose them for the covers. This one features the floating Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-56954577610761905542014-01-28T12:56:00.003-08:002014-01-28T12:56:28.129-08:00The Important ThingsI. Enjoy the Weather.
It is not a real winter here. Polar vortices are heard of but unseen. Congratulations are given, months after the fact, for the foresight to go where snow will never be shoveled. Hard times are over!
It gets down to the 50s at night. There's a heater in our house, but it's inconsistent. There is little concern about this, even though 50s-at-night can be a pretty chilly Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-57942479179828614692013-10-31T09:47:00.000-07:002013-10-31T09:47:06.747-07:00I Remember ArnieI met Arnie Raiff in ... 2003. We were both taking Carey Friedman's Experimental Theater class and it was my first semester at Columbia College Chicago. I had decided to go back to school because I was restless and aimless and wanted to write a lot. Arnie was teaching there, and taking classes that interested him. I was already intimidated, taking an experimental theater class before I'd taken Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-352802467318296792013-08-23T10:21:00.000-07:002013-08-23T10:21:21.341-07:00A Prelude to Michael CaineSometimes you take on a new project and you think, this will be a nice way to spend the weekend. We're hangin shelves! And then you do, and you have shelves.
Sometimes you think you'll start a Choose Your Own Adventure-ish blog and it will be finished in six months, but instead you're still writing it (or not-writing it) 5 years later.
Sometimes you know it's going to be a project that will Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-85044641707193803712013-08-22T10:50:00.000-07:002013-08-22T10:50:13.346-07:00Fiction: Coda -- Roy Raven[This is the third of three shorties I wrote about Roy Raven, my Pathfinder character of a year or so. This was written after the campaign's close, when the playing was done and our group had drifted to different corners of the country.
Kendra was an NPC that I decided Roy might wind up traveling with. I wrote this on the plane as Kate and I were flying to San Diego to look for an Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-8557370700329208552013-08-20T18:00:00.001-07:002013-08-20T18:06:33.384-07:00Fiction: Roy's Prayer
[The second of three stories I wrote about my Pathfinder character from the last year, a tengu bard named Roy Raven.
In this installment, we were near the end of yearish-long campaign and I felt like Roy -- who began as a bit of a boorish smartmouth -- had made something of a personal journey. One of his friends had recently sacrificed himself for the group, and I was thinking of Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-16783633624179347082013-08-17T12:27:00.001-07:002013-08-17T12:27:42.916-07:00Fiction: The Old Bird of the ShacklesMy gaming group, the Diplomancers, spent much of the last year meeting every Thursday night to play a Pathfinder adventure called The Carrion Crown. About halfway through, some of us actually wrote up the backstories to the characters we'd already been playing for months. This was the secret origin of Roy Raven, my bardish thief, who later found religion.
The Shackles are the home of pirate Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-75551211293376598852013-08-17T01:03:00.003-07:002013-08-17T01:03:58.227-07:00An Interview With Ben CostaI just interviewed my friend Ben Costa for the Longbox Project about his life and work in comics. I'm really proud of it! You should go read it.
One of the first things I did when I moved to San Francisco in 2006 was I went to my grad school's meet n' greet. It was pretty scary. I was 27, I'd just moved across the country to attend an MFA writing program in San Francisco, a place I had barely Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-77487115860606492202013-08-02T13:22:00.001-07:002013-08-02T13:22:26.086-07:00What we're reading about, thinking about, writing about, and talking about today.http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/02/2404301/36-senators-introduce-bill-prohibiting-virtually-any-new-federal-law-helping-workers/
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/08/02/kickstarter-comics-a-new-source-of-ip/
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/xkcd-time-comic/
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/08/why-physics-needs-more-tony-starks-and-less-time-travel-scenarios/
Also this:
Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-10261664426528861292013-04-22T07:49:00.001-07:002013-04-22T07:49:48.942-07:00Writing About Comics, Writing About LifeThe Longbox Project is a site that asks folks to share memories tied to specific issues in their comic book collections. This technically means "Amazing Spider-Man #258 makes me think of...", but it's just as likely to mean "For 25 years I've carried some low-level guilt around about the time I stole something from my big brother, and I finally have an excuse to confess it."
You don't have to beMatthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5972667.post-34273775125033219622013-04-21T13:32:00.001-07:002013-04-22T07:12:18.244-07:00Not the Kickstarter You're Looking ForI found this Kickstarter via io9, which found it via Superpunch, which listed it with little comments aside from "Pathetic kickstarter a from major artists."
It's a proposed illustrated novel by Bill Willingham & Frank Cho, of Fables & various comics featuring cavewomen, respectively. I'm not an active follower of either man's work, but I've got nothing against them either -- Matthew Jenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05056568940094648387noreply@blogger.com1