reviewed by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary
Lucca Comics & Games
2024. Lucca, Italy. October 30 – November 3, 2024.
https://www.luccacomicsandgames.com/
The Butterfly Effect
Our biggest takeaway
after visiting Lucca Comics & Games for the first time is that we failed as
parents by not bringing our kid. This is a festival for today’s
manga-anime-gaming obsessed generation. While it may not be comics enough for
some, the total experience is breathtaking and well worth bracing the mind-boggling
crowds. The 2024 edition of Lucca Comics & Games, the largest comic book
festival in Europe and the second-largest (after Tokyo’s Comiket) in the world,
took place from October 30 to November 3. The history of the Lucca Comics &
Games is complex, tracing back to the Salone Internazionale del Comics in 1965,
which was also held in Lucca. A new festival, Lucca Comics was created when the
Salone moved to Rome in the mid-1990s, quickly growing larger and more
prominent than the original event. In 2006 the two events reconciled, with the
Salone returning to the walled city of Lucca. What began as a comics event is
now more accurately described as a fan culture event with some comics elements
tacked on. Indeed, the comics, despite their prominence in the name, can feel
slightly residual.
The festival has grown exponentially
since that the merger almost twenty years ago. Attracting about 50,000
attendees in the mid-2000s, it sold 275,182 tickets across its five days this
year (down from the record high year in 2022). For a town of 89,000 people,
this is quite the logistical challenge. School is cancelled during the week of
the festival, with many locals abandoning the city and renting their homes to
attendees, while thousands pour in every day on the train. If you go: Plan to
take the train (book in advance) and pack light as taxis are barred from inside
the walls and only local cars are allowed. Order your wristbands well in
advance as well since they will sell out and staff scrupulously check outside
every tent. This is not an event to be dropped in on at the spur of the moment.
The enormity of the
crowds makes the festival a considerable challenge, with long queues for most
of the popular tents. This year, we counted sixty-four distinct exhibition
spaces across the entirety of the town. That does not include the expansive
Japan Town outside the walls – although Japanese producers were strongly
represented within the main site. The town was subsumed by tents, mostly
controlled by single exhibitors: Lego, Nintendo, The Cartoon Network, Hasbro,
Funko, Crunchyroll, and Samsung among many others. Some were targeted
promotions – like Netflix dedicating a large tent just to promote the second
season of Squid Game – and many offered festival exclusive merchandise. Lines
stretched for hours (the J-Pop tent must have been at least a three hour wait)
that could test the patience of even the most dedicated consumer. We queued for
almost an hour to buy a limited-edition Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt as
a gift for our son. Maybe we’re good parents after all.
The scope of the tents
is encapsulated by the festival’s stated aims: “The community event is
dedicated to comics, games, video games, fantasy books/fantasy novels, manga,
anime, animated movies, tv series, and cosplay.” Cosplay is probably misplaced
as last on that list given that a very significant percentage of the attendees
were participating cosplayers representing a wild array of pop culture
interests. Every afternoon in the square, in front of one of the many churches,
a cosplay event unfolds celebrating a different fandom. We watched a parade of
Harry Potter fans, ranging from very young children in store-bought wizard hats
to adults with highly-detailed costumes evincing hundreds of hours of work.
Everyone seems welcome.
While “comics” may lead
the title of the event, it does not much feel that way on the ground, where
video games and television seem to be the predominant interest. Several Italian
publishers host their own booths at Lucca, including Panini, Bonelli, Tunué,
and Star Comics. Of these, Panini and Bonelli had, by far, the largest and
busiest booths. Panini is the Italian publisher of both Marvel and DC’s comics,
offering much nicer editions of the works than either of those publishers sell
in the United States. They also do a large business with Disney-related works
for younger children and had long lines of autograph seekers stretching well
outside the tent into the square.
Bonelli, the venerable
Italian publisher of Dylan Dog, Tex Willer, Nathan Never
and dozens of others, also offers a wide array of products, including deluxe
editions of classic material. The Padiglione San Martino had a much larger tent
housing more than two dozen smaller comic book publishers from across Italy,
while the largest tent could be found at the Padiglione Napoleone, hosting
about sixty exhibitors including Canicola, Coconino Press, Rizzoli Lizard,
Humanoïdes Associés, and Fantagraphics. This was the primary centre of gravity
for comic book sales across the festival and, since it is a tent erected in a
town square, it revolves around a statue of Napoleon that overlooks the
commercial chaos.
As with other European
comics festivals, Lucca Comics & Games played host to a series of
exhibitions. In general, these were much smaller than what can be found at
Angoulême or Fumetto. Seven exhibitions took place in the Palazzo Ducale, each
following essentially from one room to the next and hung in front of the
permanent exhibitions of classical and renaissance Italian painting. The result
was sometimes jarring but oftentimes provocative juxtapositions. While the
Palazzo entrance was oddly difficult to find, especially as the street crowds
grew larger and larger by the hour, the exhibitions were well worth it and
generally did not have lines.
Press Animae to Play featured a small
selection of work by Yoshitaka Amano as a tease for a much larger Milan
exhibition opening about two weeks after the festival. About two dozen works,
including early anime cels and more recent covers for Sandman: The Dream
Hunters filled a single room.
Contrappunti showcased the work of
Carmine di Giandomenico, who has made a name for himself in the American comic
book market with work for Marvel (Battlin’ Jack Murdock; Magneto)
and DC (Flash).
A small show celebrating
five decades of Les Humanoïdes Associés followed, with a tight focus on Métal
Hurlant and an emphasis on its Italian contributors (Tanino Liberatore,
Magnus, Cecilia Capuana, Brandoli and Queirolo, and, of course, Hugo Pratt)
with a few pieces by well-known French cartoonists like Frank Margérin and Möebius.
Two rooms showcased
twenty years of winners of the Lucca Project Contest for young authors,
celebrating the more than 3,600 aspirants who have entered over the years.
Kalimatuna highlighted the work of
three female cartoonists from Morocco: Takoua Ben Mohamed, Zainab Fasiki, and
Deena Mohamed. Unapologetically feminist, the works on display emphasized the
impact of gender-based violence on Moroccan women.
An exhibition of the
work of Kazu Kibuishi followed, with most of its attention given appropriately
to Amulet. Significantly here, Kibuishi’s framed pages (black line art
on white pages) were displayed on backdrops of blown-up digital prints of the
colour version of the final pages, drawing easy attention to the significant
differences between the original page and the final project. We had never seen
original comics art presented in this manner, and it was tremendously smart;
particularly given that so much work in Amulet is accomplished by the
colorists.
 |
| Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi (above and below) |
Finally, the work of
Francesca Ghermandi was found in Il Pianeta Intergalattico, including a
range of her work across her lengthy career working for Frigidaire, Mondo
Gomma, and Linus.
Across town, at the
Chiesa dei Servi, the major exhibition of the show could be found: Gateway
to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art. When we first learned that the major
exhibition of the festival was related to games rather than comics we were,
frankly, disappointed. That feeling disappeared immediately upon entering the
space of the church.
The exhibition featured
the first public unveiling of the collection of Matthew Koder, a Citibank
executive who has extensively gathered D&D related artworks. It showcased
more than one hundred works - mostly oil paintings - from the 1970s to today.
The breadth of the collection is astonishing, including the oil paintings that
were used for the original editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s
Handbook, original art from the interiors of those and other early TSR
publications, the covers of early issues of Dragon Magazine, various
D&D modules and novels, and the Dungeonmaster game and television
series. The show concluded with paintings for Magic: The Gathering cards
in recognition of the ownership of the property by Wizards of the Coast. At the
end of the church a small group wearing headsets broadcasting across the church
played a campaign while attendees admired the work on the walls.
Broken into a series of
eras, the Koder Collection represented the graphic style of every revision of
the game and its rules. It was a truly magnificent exhibition, all the more
remarkable that it is held in a single collection. With luck, this show will
travel broadly as it would find an enthusiastic audience in many locations.
All of this, of course,
is only to scratch the surface. Given the vast scope of the show there were
entire sections that we never entered, from the LARPers gathered on the town’s
walls practicing their swordplay to the children playing on the Cartoon Network’s
elaborate adventure set (source of most of our parental guilt). Every
conceivable geek fandom was represented, from the traditional collector’s tents
selling vintage comic books and original art to the voluminous number of stalls
peddling t-shirts and imported Japanese anime figurines.
We were warned
beforehand that the weekend would be out of control, so we limited our visit
from Wednesday to Friday evening, leaving early Saturday morning (wheeling
suitcases through the crowds on the cobble-stone streets to the train station
was quite the adventure). Even by Friday, we had to argue with pedestrian
traffic controllers who implemented one-way thoroughfares, blocking the way to
our apartment. While we already felt
overwhelmed by the experience, it is clear that even in the full five days a
visitor could not take in everything that a show this size had to offer and
still make time to enjoy an Aperol spritz every afternoon.
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