Big Fat Cat Productions, LLC

Wally Krause is seventy-one, widowed, and quietly starving — not for food, but for the feeling of being needed. To fill the silence, he attends the funerals of people he never met, signs the guest book with a borrowed name, and eats well for the first time all week. Then a coffee stain smudges an address in the obituaries. Forty-one Chestnut, or seventy-one. He picks wrong. Inside the Salvati funeral home, a grieving crime family is waiting on a cousin from Palermo they've never seen. Wally is handed a plate of manicotti, a false name, and six weeks he was never supposed to survive. The widow knows exactly who he isn't — and hires him anyway, because a decent man with no stake in the empire may be the only person who can keep her son alive long enough to pass the bar exam. What follows is a razor-funny, unexpectedly tender story about a man who spent his life defusing teenage boys with acid bottles, and now finds himself doing the exact same job in better suits, with higher stakes and worse consequences.

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Tressa "Scooter" Murphy is ten years old, has purple hair, and carries a plastic ray gun, a tin star badge, and a Razor scooter. Her mother works nights in an ER. Her only two friends tease her mercilessly. So every evening she becomes the roughest, toughest Space Marshal in the galaxy, and posts her mission reports online, where almost nobody reads them. Almost. Two agencies read them. One is a government surveillance bureau that watches its own citizens for a living. The other is on a planet called Galaxia, where a vain and murderous emperor named Galax is three weeks out from invading Earth — and cannot stand that one small child keeps writing about him as though he's beatable. Both Galax and the government send someone to silence her. And the deadliest of them, a black-clad operative named Veronica Webster, is not a spy at all, but something older and hungrier that has already been quietly harvesting Scooter's neighbors — customers of a chain of alien-run burger restaurants —and hanging them in a warehouse, wrapped in silk. By the time Scooter understands what she has walked into, she has lost her friends, lost her nerve, and been told by every adult in her life that she made it all up. What she has left is a blog, an army of Cookie Cadets, and a rusty can of bug spray she once named a villain after.

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Ren is twelve, and the best thing in his life belongs to somebody else. He sweeps Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, catches his master's flying machines in a cargo net, mixes his pigments, and carries a half-finished portrait of an imaginary girl that he is too afraid to complete. At home, his father takes everything Ren earns and leaves marks where it doesn't show. Da Vinci tells him that art already exists — that every painting is simply waiting for an artist pure enough in heart to bring it out. Ren doesn't believe it applies to him. Then a jealous rival buys an enchanted brush from a back-alley mystic and hides it in the workshop as a murder weapon. Ren picks it up first. What's on the other side is the Realm of Unfinished Art: the Great Wave frozen mid-curl, a prairie with no buffalo drawn in yet, a Starry Night that swirls when you fall into it, a crayon T-Rex, a griffin with a temper, and a Medusa nobody ever got around to giving a happy ending. And there is Lisa — a girl half painted, half charcoal sketch, who has been waiting a very long time for someone to finish her, and who has one specific, unforgivable thing to say to the coward who walked away from her canvas. Young Da Vinci is a full-throated animated musical about the terror of your own talent, the people who make us complete, and the origin of the most famous smile in the world.

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