Walt Disney has released the first images for their forthcoming Japanese import The Secret World of Arrietty.

Residing quietly beneath the floorboards are little people who live undetected in a secret world to be discovered, where the smallest may stand tallest of all.  From the legendary Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Ponyo) comes The Secret World of Arrietty, an animated adventure based on Mary Norton’s acclaimed children’s book series The Borrowers.

Arrietty (voice of Bridgit Mendler), a tiny, but tenacious 14-year-old, lives with her parents (voices of Will Arnett and Amy Poehler) in the recesses of a suburban garden home, unbeknownst to the homeowner and her housekeeper (voice of Carol Burnett). Like all little people, Arrietty (AIR-ee-ett-ee) remains hidden from view, except during occasional covert ventures beyond the floorboards to “borrow” scrap supplies like sugar cubes from her human hosts. But when 12-year-old Shawn (voice of David Henrie), a human boy who comes to stay in the home, discovers his mysterious housemate one evening, a secret friendship blossoms. If discovered, their relationship could drive Arrietty’s family from the home and straight into danger. The English language version of The Secret World of Arrietty was executive produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, and directed by Gary Rydstrom. The film hits theaters Feb. 17, 2012. (more…)

I have not read as many books as I wanted to this year, nor have I written about as many of the ones I did manage to read. (I didn’t manage to save as much from the flood as I would have liked, either; it’s a low-batting-average kind of year.) But the year is not over, and I can catch up on one of those fronts very quickly, viz:

I’ve devoted several thousand words over the past few years to the “Best American Comics” series — see my posts on the 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009 editions — so perhaps I’ll be forgiven for not diving as deeply into the Neil Gaiman-edited 2010 edition. (Particularly since the 2011 book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat — Gaiman’s volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant — but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career “alternative” cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O’Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year — September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 — and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman’s introduction makes it clear that this isn’t the “best” comics of the year — nor even the best “American” comics of the year, whatever that may mean — but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what’s going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday. (more…)

“You can’t go back home” Thomas Wolfe wrote in a novel and I cry, amen. When I return to visit relatives in Missouri, I find the city I left almost 50 years ago strange and, in places, unrecognizable – alien, even. And last week I visited DC Comics, my employer and sustainer for decades, and found it much changed, beginning with the entrance to the building and the security forces guarding the lobby. I was told that if I wanted to see the floor that once housed Mad Magazine, I’d better hurry because it was being gutted, and the corridors leading to where I had to be were cluttered with cardboard boxes.

Maybe the whole experience was just a little forlorn?

But after a long and pleasant conversation with Dan DiDio, who honchos the company’s editorial department, I thought that perhaps the company is, in a modest, limited, yet quite good way going home again and we funny book aficionados will benefit.

The home that’s DC’s destination? Why, old comics. I mean, really old. Really old. Your grandpa’s comics, published before Marvel made continued stories the norm in the 60s. Stories of six, eight ten, maybe 12 pages, complete in one issue. (And a bunch of them in the – sigh – 52 page total package. Which cost a dime.)

An eight page story? A story even shorter than eight pages? Bizarre, you say?

No, not bizarre, Maybe even beneficial. Indulge me while I quote something I wrote a while back: Every story has to end with a lesson learned, an evil thwarted, a problem solved, a defeat, a triumph – some kind of resolution. The events of the story show how that resolution occurs. And if the writer doesn’t know how his story will end he can’t create a logical progression of scenes leading to that ending…writing an eight-pager forces the writer to know his ending before he submits the manuscript. (Except in rare cases, the beginning and end are in the same sheaf of pages, or email.)

So, knowing what his destination is, the writer can move toward it confidently instead of – brace for metaphors! – stumbling around the narrative thickets hoping to find a path. And limited length forces the writer to write only those scenes that move the plot along and this, in turn, tends to keep the story interesting: no pointless digressions to create ennui and yawns.

So: DC Comics is going to give us a glut of short fiction? No, of course not. But Dan told me that most story arcs would be limited to six issues – not exactly haiku territory, but not a completely open-ended narrative that will meander into the murk until somebody figures out how it might end, either. And writers must tell someone – probably an editor – something about the tale that’s to be told. Again, no making it up as you go along, with no clear plan on how the pieces will fit together.

Usually, I question looking to the past for answers. But every so often, answers might be found there. Don’t try to go home again, not permanently. But a now-and-then visit? To capture a bounty?

Recommended Reading: Pretty obvious, isn’t it? I should be recommending You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. But in the interest of keeping myself honest, or at least honestish, I try to read before I recommend, and if I’ve ever read Wolfe’s novel, it was long, long ago and I have no memory of it. So instead of recommending a book, let me recommend the author’s hometown. Last year, Mari and I toured Wolfe’s boyhood home in Asheville, S.C. while visiting Mars Hill College and found the house interesting, the school welcoming, and the city delightful.

Brian Selznick’s award-winning hybrid novel/graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is being released this November 23 as Hugo, a big budget film directed by Martin Scorcese. Yes, that Martin Scorcese. Coming from Paramount Pictures, the movie adapts the novel and will be available in (ugh) 3-D and 2-D and the studio kjust released both a new trailer and one-sheet which we present here.

The film, set in early 20th Century France, tells the story of not only a boy who lives in the train station but involves a mystery leading to secrets about pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès. It’s pretty fun stuff and worth a look.

First, check out this cast:

Asa Butterfield as Hugo Cabret

Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle, a friend of Hugo

Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès

Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector

Jude Law as Hugo’s father

Christopher Lee as Monsieur Labisse, the bookshop owner

Helen McCrory as Mama Jeanne, Méliès’ wife

Michael Stuhlbarg as René Tabard, a film historian

Marco Aponte as Julien Carette

Emily Mortimer as Lisette

Ray Winstone as Uncle Claude, Hugo’s deceased uncle

Frances de la Tour as Madame Emile, the owner of the café

Richard Griffiths as Monsieur Frick, the newspaper seller

Johnny Depp as M. Roulea

I’ve been trying to make it through the Green Lantern DVD. I didn’t see it in the theaters – nobody I knew actually liked it, although to be fair few totally hated it. But when a close friend who happens to be in the intellectual property racket told me the best way to see it was to download a bootleg, I got dissuaded. So now ComicMix reports there’s an “extended cut” DVD out there. Hot damn! 360 seconds of more mud.

Bobby Greenberger, who writes under the name “Robert,” reviewed this dachshund a couple days ago and he did so with all the eloquence and joie de vivre one should expect from a comic book editor turned Star Trek writer turned politician. All I can say about his review is that I agree with his observations and, damn, he’s a lot more polite than I am.

Green Lantern deserves better than this. There’s a reason why the guy has been in print for all but about eight of the past 70 years. The character actually deserves a real movie, not ten tons of CGI squeezed into a ten-ounce can. He’s survived countless reboots – and I mean countless; you can play the Monty Python Cheese Shop game with GL reincarnations. There’s something there there, and it’s something the filmmakers missed. Or avoided completely.

Now I see the clips for the new Green Lantern animated series. It’s from Warner Bros. Animation – go figure – and once again, they seem to have missed the boat by driving to the wrong ocean. This is the same company that did brilliant adaptations of the character in two solid, entertaining D2DVD movies as well as on their Justice League and Superman animated shows. Heck, they even did a great job with the guy on their Duck Dodgers show. So why they decided to abandon all of this for a diuretic dump of overly modeled CGI crap is beyond me.

Well, it isn’t quite beyond me. They’re simply following in George Lucas’s footsteps. Personally, I would have picked Bruce Timm. Or even Jay Ward. Tom Terrific looked better than this.

Maybe the writing will be so fantastic it’ll overcome their clunky, awkward and cheesy animation approach. I’m more than enough of a fanboy to give it a shot. It goes up on Cartoon Network on Armistice Day.

And, please, don’t get me started on the New 52 Green Lantern.

It has been documented that the first word a child learns to utter is, most commonly, “no”. Michele Lang’s historical urban dark fantasy, Lady Lazarus (Tor, trade Sept. 2010 $14.99, mass market June 2011 $7.99), and her heroine Magda make a fine art of “no” that turns into a resounding “yes” on the eve of WWII (up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Sept. 1^st, 1933 and the Hitler-Stalin pact), from the cafes of Buda-Pest through Austria, Germany, and Paris, to the booksellers and brothels of Amsterdam and back again. The first installment of the story, this book is as good as it gets. You cannot guess where she will take you, even in the historical bits but, once Lang gets there, it is perfectly logical and believable, even at its most outrageous.

Why? Because Lang has done her history, theology, and Bible homework and Knows her Kabbalah in a way that even some whiskery old masters do not. And she makes you believe. Even her undead, demonic, and angelic characters are utterly human and thus you are compelled to watch this tragic train-wreck of a story (after all, we know the atrocities of WWII) that is not without the insanity of hope. Her prose sings—even in her English translations the music of the German, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Aramaic remains. Amidst all the darkness, the light shines, even in some romance with an angel, Raziel (Secrets of God), whose description really is like that of a Greek god (trust me, I know one…wink).  But no clichés, here, and no punches pulled, ever—no flinching. People suffer exquisitely for what they believe in, to save their way of life, their people (Jews, witches, vampires, demonesses). Lang tortures her characters in ways unimagined by those not acquainted with the depths of the mystical lore in all its facets, beautiful and horrifying. All to a purpose.

Imagine a world where the daughters of men perpetuate their legacy since primordial times, since Eve, where angels fall for their beliefs, and a line of daughters can return from the dead and work great magics, but always at a great price (and Lang’s word painting is worthy of renderings in movies and graphic novels)? Can you stop a war? Can you stand back and not even try—hide or run? The entire story hinges on the last two lines of the book: “Who do you love? Do you seek the darkness or the light?” Only, once you read this, and I dare you to be unaffected by it, your definitions of dark and light may not remain so neat and tidy. Sweet dreams. Call on your guardian angels. They will come. They are real.