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This year Lucca Comics & Games will offer an exceptional opportunity to all manga readers: 12 manga artists will meet their fans during showcases and maxi showcases, book signings and events. Many manga artists have been announced over the last few weeks, like Gou Tanabe (well known for his manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s works published by J-POP Manga), Yuto Tsukuda and Shun Saeki (versatile authors of Food Wars!, published by Planet Manga), Akane Torikai (popular for Saturn Return, she will present her new works, also published by Dynit Manga), Usamaru Furuya (comes back with Coconino Press after the warm welcome he received last year), Shintaro Kago (the undisputed Ero Guru Sensei comes back to Lucca with Hollow Press) and Atsushi Kamijo (a manga artist who left his mark on the history of comics, guest of saldaPress). Today, we have new additions: Kyotarou Azuma (illustrator of the fast-paced Tenkaichi and the epic Versus, published by Star Comics), Baron Yoshimoto (a renowned artist in the manga world, representative of gekiga and one of the guests of Coconino Press), Yamada Sansuke (third and last guest of Coconino Press), Asagi Yaenaga (horror author of Enki, published by Hollow Press) and Miyako Cojima (the artist who weaves together horror and beauty, guest of Hikari). 

Over the summer we launched the first guest from South Korea, Paskim (author of Lost in the Cloud, at her first international guest appearance with Jundo). During today’s event we added two new authors, loved by fans and passionate about manhwa: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (author of The Naked Tree published by BAO Publishing) and KimMyeongmi (extremely well known for What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?, published in Italy by Renoir Comics). 

South Korea and its exceptionally rich webtoon production will be the center of the exhibition Webtoon: the new Korean way. Webtoon are serialized comics imagined and realized to be read on the smartphone. They were first created in South Korea in the early 2000s on online services platforms, and then they spread out to the rest of the world at the same time as the Hallyu, the wave of success that South Korean cultural industry products met abroad. They represent a new way of drawing comics, very distant from traditional publishing, and they are extremely useful to understand how complex and delicate the relation between culture and content is in the era of digital platforms. The exhibition – realized in collaboration with Zipaki, and the publishing houses Panini, J-POP, Star Comics, Renoir, Jundo – aims to explore this new Korean way. 

The rich number of Asian female and male authors grows with three representatives from China: Liang Azha (author, among his other works, of All of You and Checkmate!) and ChenXi (author of Of Machine and Beast, which counts more than 1.8 billion views on the platform KuaiKan Comics) - both Jundo’s guests – and Yi Yang (who has been living in Italy for more than ten years and who has created a secret thematic stand, brought to Lucca by his editor BAO Publishing). 

Thanks to the collaboration between Toshokan and Dala Publishing, Lucca Comics & Games will host many Taiwanese comic artists: Ruan Guang-min (The Corner Store, Railway Sonata), HOM (Priceless), Ding Pao-Yen (Console, 2073, which will be presented for the first time in Lucca) and Monday Recover (whose works have not been published in Italy yet).