Lucca Comics & Games, the biggest pop-culture festival in Europe, is back! It will run from 28th October to 1st November and will once again be held in the medieval walled city of Lucca.
Lucca Comics & Games 2022 is the largest convention of its kind in Europe (and the second largest in the world after Comiket in Tokyo) and brings together thousands of fans of comic, gaming, video games, fantasy fiction, manga, anime, animated films, TV series and cosplay from all over the world.
We find out more about the convention with its Executive Director Emanuele Vietina…
How much do you enjoy running Lucca Comics & Games?
All of the people in our teams are passionate and dedicated comics, fantasy and games and we belong to the communities that we take care of.
So for us, speaking about the culture is taking care of our beloved people and our beloved authors. So we want to create chances for meeting others. It’s probably a dream come true. I was a volunteer and even before I started to attend the convention in the Eighties with my mothernand basically I never stopped.
Running Lucca comics in games is a bit of a mess [but] we are much much better and are coming back to the stage in full force. We never stopped during the pandemic and we are going to bring in all the innovation and we want to create a new normal show, larger than ever.
It’s a bit of a job, we are of course under pressure. We started with a small team of 15 to 20 people in Lucca and [now it’s] 40-50 people. It’s going to take about from 12 to 15 months. I mean right now, we are already working for Luca 2023!
What can we expect at this year’s Lucca Comics & Games?
On the 31st of October, on Halloween, we are going to have the European premiere of Wednesday with Tim Burton – that probably is going to change Lucca comics and games forever.
In terms of movies and TV shows, we are very very happy to announce the presence of the actors from Willow and Andor. I was a huge fan of Willow and I had hoped to have worked with Warwick Davis, but Warwick Davis cannot be here, but we are going to we’re going to have Amar Chadha-Patel and Erin Kellyman and Ellie Bamber. So three actors from Willow and two actors from Andor.
Another thing we are going to do, on the bastion of our medieval city, is we are going to re-create the Andor setting with cosplay and we are also going to have the European junket with Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley (the screenwriter from Spider-man Homecoming) and Jeremy Latcham for the Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. We are role playing game people so it’s such an honour for us.
In terms of comics, we are going to have people from the US comics and comic film world and from the Japanese world. So for the sixtieth anniversary of Spider-Man, we are going to have John Romita Jr. He’s a beloved author. We have an original submission of John Romita from back in the day and we are going to have C. B. Cebulski, editor-in-chief from Marvel. This is important for artists from all over the world. C.B. is coming to do recruitment. It’s big.
Then we’re going to have Lee Bermejo from DC, Batman and other stuff. Then for mangaka, we are very happy to announce we have Nagabe sensei, author of Girl From The Other Side, Atsushi Ohkubo from Soul Eater and Fire Force, and we will show a female Berserk style from Claymore – Norihiro Yagi.
We’re going also to have the One Piece Film: Red world premiere with the director Gorô Taniguchi. And for Final Fantasy, we have Yoshitaka Amano, the character designer for the first six or seven chapters here to celebrate the anniversary of Final Fantasy, and this is great.
In terms of traditional sci fi and fantasy we’re going to celebrate Space 1999 and we’re going to have a guest of honour from the steampunk radical fantasy Nevernight, with Jay Kristoff from Australia. We’re also going to have a great show on Twitch with guest Glenn Cooper.
In between all the stuff, staying on video games, we’re going to have the CD PROJEKT RED 20th anniversary and can they’re going to celebrate the Witcher and Cyberpunk, Edgerunners and 207
Speaking of The Witcher, we heard Lucca is also having an orchestra play a concert dedicated to the franchise?
[Writer] Andrzej Sapkowski has come to Lucca three times, so The Witcher is a natural [partner] to Lucca. [The concert is being conducted by) is Eímear Noone from Dublin, who was first woman to direct the Academy Awards’ orchestra. She is also the composer of World of Warcraft soundtrack, Hearthstone, Diablo III.
The concert is dedicated to The Witcher soundtrack and she’s going to direct the RG, which is the Italian youth orchestra, with 70 young musicians, performers and there is a beautiful chorus, so the full band can perform. It’s a huge show.
This year’s theme for the convention is Hope – what does that theme mean?
At Lucca, we have [a number of values] and we think that hope can be the [next] value. It’s what Lucca is able to provide to people, especially after three years of pandemic and now the war.
Moreover, it’s a sort of invitation for the people of Lucca to come as participants. People don’t want to see the show anymore, they want to be the show. That is the reason why Lucca is a national stage for cosplayers.
We have to find the theme that is important for our modern mythologies and of course it is so connected with Star Wars and Superman. The symbol on Superman’s chest is the symbol for hope. It’s not wishful thinking, Hope is a vision that becomes true. So we want to tell people that our modern mythologies teach us to be standard bearers of hope.
I think that Lucca is a perfect combination of the saga of science fiction or fantasy that we love. It’s a beautiful gathering of beautiful people.
Lucca Comics & Games will be taking place from 28th October to 1st November. More information can be found here.
