After Italy Elected a Far-Right Government, Cosmopolitan Comic-Con Lucca Took on Political Significance

The lasting image of this year’s Lucca Comics and Games convention is a shot of director Tim Burton, waving to a seemingly unending crowd from a balcony in the historic center of this medieval Tuscany town.

That one shot represents how Lucca has evolved from a tiny, hyper-localized convention for comic and game fans into one of the most important pop culture events on the international calendar.

Europe’s largest comics festival (and the world’s number two, larger than San Diego’s Comic-Con and just behind Japan’s Comiket), Lucca Comics and Games has become a hub for the film, TV and games industries, which arrived in force at Lucca 2022, the first proper in-person event since 2019 (last year’s Lucca was in-person but with strict limits on capacity, due to COVID). All of them were pitching to the same 320,000 fans crammed into this historic location, hungrily awaiting the latest in nerd-friendly content.

Alongside Burton, who presented the European premiere of Wednesday, his new Netflix series, V.I.P. guests included the cast from Disney’s Willow, Andor actress Denise Gough, members of the cast of the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, legendary comic book artist John Romita Jr., as well as Goro Taniguchi, director of Japanese anime hit One Piece Red.

Similar to Comic-Con, Lucca has expanded beyond its original source material as a comic book convention to embrace all aspects of fan pop culture, from video games to cosplay, from television to movies to tabletop games.

“We have to be the trailblazers. For comics, tabletop games, for the Italian cultural industry as a whole,” says Emanuele Vietina, general director of Lucca Comics and Games. “We speak to the single smallest publisher as well as the well-established, more famous companies… We are the stage managers of this huge show.”

In addition to Burton presenting Wednesday, this year’s show included the Italian premiere of One Piece Red, panels with the Willow and Rings of Power casts, and a Q&A session with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, where they screened clips of their hotly-anticipated Paramount Pictures feature, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez.

“We are happy to be at the center of Italian culture [for the five days of the Lucca festival],” says Vietina, “and we’re proud that we got there without receiving much support from [government] institutions. There are young members in our team with well-defined passions, who have earned their place. To us, the most important thing is community.”

This year’s Lucca also took on a special, political significance. As a cosmopolitan event celebrating cultural exchange across borders — hundreds of thousands of fans from all corners of the globe crammed into this small walled city, turning the town of 90,000 overnight into a cosplay wonderland —Lucca was a particularly safe space in a country still rocked by last month’s election of the far-right government led by Giorgia Meloni. As if to emphasize the point, this year’s theme was Hope.

Not that Lucca is overtly political. The event’s organizers, Lucca Crea, are partly state-owned, meaning Lucca Comics and Games general director Emanuele Vietina and his team have to remain strictly neutral and non-ideological.

“We’ve had a public-political management for 25 years now,” says Vietina, “and we’ve gone through every color in Italian politics. Our approach doesn’t change [we have] a very precise editorial line and we’ve always followed that.”

But just the fact of the event speaks volumes.

“Every year, Lucca Comics and Games proves that this community of consumers and fans is the model for a better society,” says Vietina. “We’re here to stay, because we can be together.”