LUCCA COMICS & GAMES 2024 UNVEILS: THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

Story: Ralph Greco, Jr.

Lucca Comics & Games has today launched the new poster for its 2024 edition. This year’s festival, themed ‘The Bufferfly Effect’, has had its poster designed by world famous Japanese artist, Yoshitaka Amano.

For ‘The Butterfly Effect’, Amano created not just one image, but three, each representing an act of this extraordinary work.

Today Lucca Comics & Games releases OUVERTURE represented by the work that Amano dedicated to Puccini’s Tosca. An embrace between two characters, between physicality and imagination, which captures all the exuberant energy of the festival and the thousand colors of its audience of butterflies. The image dedicated to Madama Butterfly will arrive in September and on 30 October the festival will present a third work by Amano, this time linked to his immortal princess Turandot, to reflect the apotheosis of creativity and passion that is Lucca Comics & Games.

Lucca has always aimed to be a crossroads of different arts – a place where comics, games, cinema, literature, and music converge into a multisensory experience.

In the year of the Puccini centenary, it is only natural to think that Lucca Comics & Games would present a contemporary version of that synesthetic ideal which, a century ago, was represented by opera, a combination of literary invention, scenic wonder and musical magic.

25th anniversary of One Piece started simultaneously from Milan, Berlin, London, Madrid and Paris, on the occasion of the birthday of Monkey D. Luffy, the famous straw-hat pirate, but it will be in Lucca on most important moment to close the celebrations in style and with all the numerous fans. In fact, two great guests from Japan will participate in Lucca Comics & Games: Tatsuya Nagamine (director of the last years of One Piece and previously of many other TOEI titles, including Dragon Ball Super: Broly) and Kenji Yokoyama (historical animator from the first episodes to today). Not only that, the celebrations will also continue at the TOEI Animation stand with many surprises and new features to be announced in the coming weeks!

In a new feature for 2024, Lucca Comics & Games will this year leave the urban walls of Lucca and land at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, with the exhibition AMANO CORPUS ANIMÆ, dedicated to Yoshitaka Amano. This exhibition will offer a complete overview of his work, highlighting his extraordinary ability to merge Anime, Video Games and contemporary art into a single, inimitable artistic vision. More than 100 original works will tell the history of animation and world entertainment; the epic images that have consecrated the “boy from Shizuoka” in the Olympus of contemporary artists will range from Tatsunoko to Final Fantasy , passing through Vogue. The exhibition will happen after the festival. From November 13, 2024 to March 1, 2025, “Amano Corpus Animae ” will be the first retrospective to celebrate the 50-year career of the visionary Maestro. The largest and most complete exhibition ever dedicated to the Japanese artist in the West. Curated for Lucca Comics & Games by Fabio Viola, with the exhibition design and itinerary is created in collaboration with POLI.design of Milan.

50TH ANNIVERSARY FOR DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AND THE PLAYING COMMUNITY OF THE WORLD

To celebrate 50 years, Lucca Comics & Games is dedicating not one but two unique tributes to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, transforming this anniversary into a gigantic collective party.

For the first time the Koder Collection will be exhibited, with original masterpieces by Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson, Brom, Todd Lockwood, in a unique exhibition in the world entitled “Gateway to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art”. It will be curated by Jon Peterson, one of the most important historians of the game, author among other things of Dungeons and Dragons – Art & Arcana and the extraordinary collection of rare documents The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977, recently published by Wizards of the Coast, and by Jessica Lee Patterson, an art historian who has been working on cataloguing the collection since 2022. The exhibition will be hosted in the extraordinary and sacred Church of the Servi, already used in the past for the display of original tables, redesigned to accommodate an editorial and artistic path that also leaves great space for experience and the games played.

It doesn’t end there. The role-playing game will leave a permanent trace in the city of gaming par excellence: the municipal administration of Lucca will rename the basement of the San Paolino bastion, after Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the creators of Dungeons & Dragons. This is the culmination of a journey started 15 years ago with Larry Elmore, Tracy and Laura Hickman.

Jeremy Crawford, lead rules designer of Dungeons & Dragons and lead designer of the new 2024 version, will be present in Lucca to investigate the present and future of the first and longest-running role-playing game.

Additionally, Tetris will celebrate its 40th anniversary at Lucca Comics & Games with the participation of the game’s creator and the co-founder of The Tetris Company. In 1984, Alexey L. Pajitnov, a programmer at the Moscow Academy of Sciences and a great lover of puzzle games, presented the world with what would become a universal phenomenon: Tetris. One of the most iconic and beloved video games of all time, with hundreds of millions of copies sold on over 50 platforms, Tetris continues to captivate fans of all ages around the world. Alexey L. Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and Henk B. Rogers, co-founder of The Tetris Company, will talk about the game’s history, its impact on pop culture, and share their thoughts on the brand’s future direction with the participants of Lucca Comics & Games.

At Lucca Comics & Games, Star Wars™: Unlimited, the fast-paced and easy-to-learn collectible card game where players explore a galaxy of endless possibilities, engaging in thrilling head-to-head battles featuring the most famous characters from the Star Wars universe, will be featured in a world premiere! Worldwide pre-release events for Set 3, The Twilight of the Republic, will take place on Friday, November 1, but at Lucca Comics & Games, they will start on Wednesday, October 30. Two days of exclusive pre-release, where all Italian players and Star Wars fans can see, touch, and experience the new Star Wars™: Unlimited set before anyone else in the world.

There will be a special round table with Lucca Comics & Games Festival Director Emanuele Vietina on Thursday 27th June at 3:30pm CET (2:30pm BST).

Lucca Comics & Games is the most important pop culture event in Europe, a unique community event of its kind in the world. The event is dedicated to comics, games, video games, animated cinema, fantasy fiction, illustration and TV series, under the direction of Emanuele Vietina.

A very rich program divided into 5 days, from 30 October to 3 November, made up of hundreds of events, tournaments, game sessions, exhibitions, concerts, fashion shows, Italian and international guests, but above all a community event created by hundreds of thousands of fans and visitors who meet every year in one of the most evocative historic centers in the world: Lucca. “The largest geek gathering in the West” (Variety), this is Lucca Comics & Games, an event with 58 years of history behind it, dedicated to contemporary pop culture and new mythologies. Community, Inclusion, Discovery, Respect, Gratitude: Lucca Comics & Games has been based on these 5 values ​​for years, shared between authors, audiences, guests and partners.
The 2023 edition ended with 315,470 tickets sold and 741,428 attendances, not counting the over 13,000 accredited professionals.

Over the years, Lucca Comics & Games has tried to integrate as much as possible into the cultural context of the city, developing formats, proposals, creative and promotional ideas aimed at enhancing the artistic-monumental heritage of Lucca, enhancing these riches within the exhibition offer and cultural aspect of the event, experimenting with the contamination of different languages ​​and media, in the name of a unique transmedia event in the world. The walls, the squares, the historic buildings, the medieval alleys and the mysterious undergrounds welcome the participants, the great sagas and all the partners of the event who together make up the large community of Lucca Comics & Games, ready to live an unparalleled experience .