This one’s for Elayne and Valerie, because dang it, sometimes when guys talk about geek porn, we really mean geek porn:

In the great lineage of comic books, no one has explored heroes and villains quite like Nerdcore™. In this 12-month, 2008 calendar, heroines and their evil counterparts square off in quite revealing ways — a fully nude firestarter igniting her surroundings, a “super” lass undresses after a hard day’s night of battling bad guys, and a katana-wielding vixen, wearing a headband and not much else, shows a few ninjas who’s the real boss is. These are the powered-up ladies that watch over downtown Los Angeles from rooftops and can turn invisible with the snap of a finger. They are the heroes and villains of the 2008 Nerdcore™ calendar.

The best thing about this calendar– okay, tied for first– is that the calendar also includes the high holy days for geeks, including major movie releases like Iron Man, Speed Racer, The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones 4, Harold and Kumar 2, and The Incredible Hulk; conventions like San Diego Comic-Con, Alternative Press Expo, etc.; anniversaries for Night of the Living Dead and more cult classics; birthdays for Stan Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Jean Luc Picard and others; even Sarah Connor’s assassination, the morning Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 departed, and the day Marty was sent back to the future.

Hey, that’s important to me, I write for a website that needs that kind of important information. Shut up. I need this calendar for the dates. And no, not the dates that involve a jar of– just shut up.

Do I really have to tell you the link is not safe for work? Fine, you’ve been warned.

Now if there was only a way to put in an Amazon link for it… wait, it actually is available on Amazon? Well, what are you waiting for? This has got to make a decent Christmas present for someone you know. Even if the only thing they want to do with it is burn it.

Have you been to the Beeb’s Doctor Who site lately?  Worth checking out not only for the nifty countdown to the upcoming Voyage of the Damned episode guest-starring Kylie Minogue (just run your cursor over Kylie) but for its advent(ure) calendar filled with lots of fun interactive stuff, behind the scenes looks, etc.  Love the jigsaw puzzle!

The special is set to run for 71 minutes instead of the usual 60, so you lucky Brits should tune to BBC1 at 6.50 pm on Christmas Day instead of 7.  That ought to mean the special will start hitting YouTube ’round about 5 PM Eastern US time.

And of course you can click here for all your Steampunk Dalek needs.

Today is young adult fantasy writer Tamora Pierce’s 53rd birthday. Pierce is most famous for creating young heroines, most memorably, the medieval transvestite, Alanna of Trebond from the series, The Song of the Lioness. The noble-born girl wants to become a knight and goes the way of Hilary Swank a la Boys Don’t Cry (minus the rape, but being up against a dragon is no fun either). Either way, those young female readers need their empowerment stories any way they can get them. Cross-dressing knight heroines is as good a way as any.

Tamora is probably best known to comics fans as the co-author of the recent White Tiger miniseries for Marvel starring former FBI agent Angela Del Toro, taking off from Brian Bendis’s run on Daredevil.

Ambition, all by itself, is neither good nor bad. The greatest artistic works wouldn’t exist without vast reservoirs of ambition, but ambition by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Even ambition combined with proven ability isn’t necessarily successful. And just because one work by a particular creator (or creators) was transcendently wonderful, that doesn’t mean the next related work will be equally so.

And that brings us to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the Tom Sawyer, Abroad of our day – a book that should have been something really special, given its predecessors’ pedigree, but which instead is self-indulgent and shows signs of existing purely because of contractual reasons.

But let me back up. There have been two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories so far, both of which were excellent pulpish adventure, homages to writer Alan Moore’s favorite British stories from the turn of the last century. There was something of a tendency to paint the lily even there, though – to cram in references every which way, to show either how smart Moore was or how much genre fiction he had read. But the references were only rarely important to those two stories, and the times they were – the revelation of the first “M,” for example – they were very obvious references, which nearly every reader of the comic would grasp quickly. Neither of the first two League stories was great literature, but they were excellent adventure stories, though they did imply that Moore took old pulpy stories more seriously than perhaps he should.

Black Dossier is not the third major League story; that’s still to come, in a year or three, from a different publisher in an unlikely format. It’s instead a weird hybrid of story and background, with a League story set in the 1950s wrapped around a collection of documents from the past of that history; those documents, of course, comprise the titular dossier. In the frame story, a young blonde couple steal the dossier and run away with it, pursued by nastier fictional characters. To understand the villains, the reader must recognize James Bond (not too difficult), remember Harry Lime (somewhat tougher), and have some idea who Bulldog Drummond is (exceptionally difficult). (more…)