The Golden Compass is the new film from New Line, directed by Chris Weitz, and starring Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott and the voices of Ian McKellan and Ian McShane, among others.  It’s about a young girl, Lyra, who lives in a world where everyone’s soul is outside her body, represented by an animal who can not only talk, but also argue.  The soul, called a daemon, is able to change shape until its human reaches maturity, when it “settles” into one form.

There has been a great deal of controversy about this film, based on the book by Philip Pullman, because some people think the bad guys (members of an organization called The Magisterium) is The Church. The Magisterium is conducting experiments, trying to remove daemons from children “for their own good,” and so “they will obey the rules.”  There’s also a lot of talk about a substance called Dust, but that doesn’t play an important part in the story until the later two chapters of the trilogy.

Martha Thomases:  What did you think of the movie?  What would you tell people who don’t know anything about it?

Lillian Baker:  I think it’s pretty good as long as you’re someone who likes surprises.  There were a lot of sudden movements.

MT:  Would you call it a scary movie? (more…)

Mark Crilley has been influenced by Japan before: his best-known work, the long all-ages Akiko series, is about a Japanese girl who has various adventures on alien worlds, and various elements of Japanese culture found their way into that book. But Akiko was still clearly a Western comic by a Western creator.

Miki Falls, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt at what’s called an “OEL Manga” – something that follows many of the conventions of Japanese comics but was written as an Original English Language work. Crilley doesn’t draw his book backwards – wisely, I think, since if it can be difficult for a reader to switch orientation, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a creator to do so – but it’s otherwise a very manga-influenced work. And so I’m looking at it this week as our “Manga Friday” feature.

Miki is just starting her senior year of high school in a fairly rural area of Japan. She’s determined to be really herself during this new year – not to go along with other people because it’s easier. (This seems to be a common desire for manga protagonists, possibly – he said, putting on his armchair group psychologist hat – because Japan is such a homogenous, conformist society.) But, since this is a manga story – and, to be less culturally specific, because it is a story about a teenage girl, and mostly written for other teenage girls – she meets a boy. A new boy in school. A mysterious, attractive, fascinating, keeps-to-himself boy. A boy named Hiro Sakurai.

Miki tells herself that she’s not falling in love with Hiro, but of course she is. And of course he’s utterly aloof, ignoring her – and everyone else in the school – at all times. Spring is the story of their meeting, and Miki’s budding love-hate relationship with Hiro (love him because he’s a dreamy boy, hate him because he won’t even look at her). At the end, we learn the secret, very manga-esque, reason why Hiro must hold himself aloof from all love…nay! from any normal human emotion! (Oops. I’m channeling Stan Lee there. That’s not a specific hint, but Miki and Hiro’s relationship does have aspects very familiar to Western comics readers, with a large helping of angst.)

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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.