KULT ROCK - News Comicon 2025

About / Advertising / Issues / KultRock Sound / Events / Staff / Contact / Subscribe

di Redazione 12.12.2024

COMICON Napoli reaches the finish line of the XXV edition ! Everyone is ready for the long four-day party, from 1 to 4 May 2025 at the Mostra d'Oltremare, after the extraordinary success of the 2024 edition which welcomed 175,000 visitors.

The special anniversary begins with a surprise: the COMICON Napoli 2025 poster is an image created for the occasion by Jamie Hewlett , a British artist best known for having created Gorillaz , the virtual band with extraordinary international success, together with Damon Albarn. The protagonist of the poster is a girl, an indomitable fan of comics, animation and pop culture, ready to do anything to reach her favorite festival!

As per tradition, the 25th edition also celebrates a master of the ninth art, and this year it is one of the greatest interpreters of modern Italian comics, an artist who helped define the post-punk aesthetic of the 1980s in Italy and Europe: Tanino Liberatore . As Magister , Liberatore will be the protagonist of a solo exhibition, will curate an exhibition dedicated to an international comics artist who will be revealed in January, and will be the focus of talks, meetings and some special initiatives.

Among the first international guests from the world of comics: Jon J. Muth , American writer and illustrator, arrives in Italy for the first time, known initially for some of the most innovative pictorial works in comics such as Moonshadow or Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown , and later for his delicate and award-winning children's books such as Zen Shorts ; Arthur De Pins , a multifaceted French artist and animator known for Il taglio fisso, La marcia del gabbiano, Zombillenium, returns to Italy after more than 15 years ; Da Rick Robertson , American cartoonist and screenwriter on the scene for over 30 years, co-creator of Transmetropolitan and the wild series The Boys ; Boichi , Korean mangaka, author of Sun Ken Rock , Origin and artist of the best-selling manga Dr. Stone , whose anime debuts with the fourth season in January 2025; Thomas Taylor , illustrator and children's writer known for having created the cover of the first British edition of Harry Potter , and author of the Malamander novel series ; Paskim , internationally renowned manhwa author, best known for Lost in the Cloud , awarded as Webtoon of Excellence at the Lezhin Awards in 2022 and 2023; first time in Italy also for Álvaro Martínez Bueno , co-creator of the post-apocalyptic horror series The Nice House on The Lake , one of the most awarded comics at the Eisner Awards and Angoulême in recent years.

A place of honor in this edition goes to Altan , one of the most beloved and esteemed illustrators, cartoonists and satirical authors of all time, who will receive the COMICON 2025 Special Award for Lifetime Achievement.

On the occasion of the 25th edition, there will be no shortage of initiatives to celebrate the evolution of the relationship between the festival, the city and comics, such as the exhibition “Naples: Fumetto Destination” , which will tell the role that the city of Naples has played in the history of the Ninth Art, inspiring works and leading Italian and international artists, capable of exploring the thousand faces of a vital, stimulating and complex metropolis that in 2025 will stage the 2500th anniversary of the foundation of Neapolis in 475 BC.

The sale of season tickets and online tickets for COMICON Napoli 2025 has begun , the festival that in 25 years has placed Naples at the center of the international panorama of major comics & games events, available on ticket.comicon.it and, for the first time, also offered in a luxurious limited edition, namely an exclusive Silver Pass accompanied by a celebratory box and special dedicated services and benefits, to experience and remember in a unique way the birthday of a festival without equal.

“With the 25th edition COMICON Naples presents a mature and complete festival, which brings with it the traces of the life lived together with the visitors who have accompanied it since its beginnings” – says Matteo Stefanelli, Artistic Director of COMICON . “ COMICON recognizes itself in its audience, as the poster created for us by Jamie Hewlett, one of the most influential visual artists in the world, tells us. The image of Murphy, the festival's number 1 fan, is the portrait of a sister, an ideal friend, one of us. Hewlett portrays in her not only the passion for comics and pop culture, but also her undisciplined vitality, her challenge to overcome difficulties and conventions. I am grateful to Jamie for the gift he has given to the Italian public and to all of us with this collaboration as rare as it is precious, which makes us proud of the work we do, still nourished today by the same spirit as his Murphy. This is also why COMICON is already announcing its richest program of international guests ever, and it is doing so earlier than in the past.”

To celebrate the 25th edition, COMICON Napoli has entrusted the creation of the official poster to a great international artist, one of the most famous and influential image creators of our time, who, starting from comics, animation and music, has come to uniquely mark the visual panorama of contemporary culture.

At the center of the poster by Jamie Hewlett, author of the iconic Tank Girl , a cult character in post-punk comics, and creator of the virtual band Gorillaz with Damon Albarn, we find Murphy. A girl who is both a nerd and a punk, whose face is inspired by Alfred E. Neuman, legendary mascot of MAD Magazine. Murphy is a true nerd who carries with her the signs of her great passions, including T-shirts, patches and pins with which Hewlett represents animated series, comics, films and music that have fueled her education and that of an entire generation, artists and fans united by their passion for Hayao Miyazaki or Robert Crumb, Calvin & Hobbes or Watchmen , Tanino Liberatore or Daniel Clowes. A metaphor for the unbridled enthusiasm and vital energy that comics and pop culture instill in all of us, Murphy has the courage and audacity to claim all of this, expressing the joy of feeling like “fan number 1”!

“Young Murphy has a black eye and a missing tooth, the result of a fun weekend spent in the woods with her BMX. As painful as these injuries are, they won’t stop her from participating in her favorite festival: COMICON!” - comments Jamie Hewlett.

Born in 1968, British artist Jamie Hewlett is a prolific artist who defies the usual categories of contemporary creativity. On the scene relentlessly for over three decades, he has often captured the essence of our times with his pioneering and energetic work. Hewlett is a paradox: he is very serious about art that doesn't take itself too seriously; and he is part of a globally recognizable cultural phenomenon, yet he loves to constantly reinvent his own artistic language.

Hewlett is best known for co-creating the internationally successful virtual band Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. The award-winning group broke new ground by refusing to subscribe to an industry obsessed with real-life celebrities; instead, Hewlett creates and recreates the band's characters and environments in animated form, including the now-legendary stage animations at their concerts. He rose to prominence in the late 1980s with anarchic comics centered on a powerful and unapologetic female protagonist—the first of its kind—in Tank Girl . A multifaceted artist, Hewlett moves between the worlds of design, art, and music, fusing a multitude of global cultural influences into work that always adopts a punk sensibility. Hewlett openly cites a wide variety of sources, from hip hop to opera, zombie slasher films to Westerns.

Hewlett's impact extends beyond the visual arts and music; he is also known for his work in advertising and activism, including several projects on environmental issues. Hewlett was awarded the Jim Henson Creativity Honour in 2005 and Designer of the Year by the Design Museum, London in 2006. In 2007, Hewlett designed an elaborate live performance of the Chinese novel Journey to the West , Damon Albarn and Wu Cheng'en's show Monkey: Journey to the West , which premiered at the Manchester International Festival and then toured to Paris and Berlin. In 2009, Hewlett and Albarn won a BAFTA for their animated sequence Monkey for the Beijing Olympic Games. In 2015, Hewlett exhibited his work in The Suggestionists , a solo exhibition of prints at the Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2017, Taschen published a large-format monograph on Hewlett’s 25-year career. This was followed by The Gorillaz Art Book in 2022, which added over 40 artists he invited to create works inspired by the world of Gorillaz to Hewlett’s original creations.

Tanino Liberatore is one of the most famous masters of modern Italian comics, and an artist who helped define the post-punk aesthetic of the 1980s in Italy and Europe. Born in Abruzzo in Quadri, after attending art school in Pescara he moved to Rome to study architecture and began working in advertising, creating album covers published by RCA for Ivan Graziani, Nada, Gilda Giuliani and Gianni Morandi.

In 1978 Andrea Pazienza, his high school friend, involved him in the experience of the underground magazine Cannibale . On the pages of this legendary self-produced magazine he published his first comics, drawing stories written by Stefano Tamburini. And it was here that Tamburini, Liberatore and Pazienza gave life to Rank Xerox, a bizarre android, a sort of punk Frankenstein. In 1980 the character moved to the magazine Frigidaire , changing its name to Ranxerox due to a warning from the photocopier company of the same name. Liberatore now took care of the drawings entirely, giving the character its definitive, explosive and hypertrophic graphic character. Ranx was now a cult, an inspired and ultra-violent generational nightmare whose fame spread to the most diverse creative circuits: fashion, music, cinema, experimental theatre. In this last field Liberatore created the sets and costumes for the play Sulla strada (1982) by the Magazzini Criminali company. In cinema and TV in particular, his work begins to be in great demand: he is called to design the poster for the launch in Europe of Blade Runner by Ridley Scott first, and then of La pelle by Liliana Cavani. These images will not be published, but other projects soon arrive: in 1982 he creates the sets for the TV program Mister Fantasy hosted by Carlo Massarini for Rai1, and in 1983 he signs the poster for Invito al viaggio by Peter Del Monte.

In 1982 he moved to Paris, but continued to create stories and covers for Il Male and Frigidaire , and to work remotely with Tamburini on Ranxerox, which began to be translated by the main international comics magazines, from L'Echo des Savanes to Heavy Metal to El Vibora, transforming a generational cult into a global success. Among his readers was also Frank Zappa, who proposed to Liberatore to collaborate, and he had himself portrayed in “Ranxerox style” in the cover illustration of his album The Man from Utopia . In 1985 Andrea Pazienza made him the protagonist of one of his stories, “La leggenda di Italianino Liberatore”.

During the 1980s, Liberatore's activity focused on illustration. For publishing, he illustrated the covers of the Dobermann noir novels by Joël Houssin, and drew for magazines such as Transfert, Chic magazine, Hustler. For cinema, he collaborated on Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters , visualizing the ghosts of the famous film. For fashion, he worked on advertising campaigns for brands such as Moschino, Citroën, Escada, Energie.

Tamburini's death in 1986 affected Liberatore, and left the last story of the "synthetic coatto" unfinished. Tanino returned to comics only in the mid-nineties, publishing new stories for L'Echo des Savanes , a story for the event series Batman Black & White , and resuming work on Ranxerox with the help of his friend, actor and director, Alain Chabat, with whom he developed the idea that had remained unfinished. In the late nineties, Liberatore also began to experiment with digital technologies applied to drawing and color, with which he created Lucy - La speranza , a graphic novel on the origins of man written by Patrick Norbert and which was published in 2007 after almost ten years of work.

After a cameo in Chabat's Didier , cinema became a regular field of action: Liberatore acted in Rémi Bezançon's short films, in Kiki Picasso's experimental film Traitement de substitution n°4 , and designed sets and costumes for 24 hours in the life of a woman by Laurent Bouhnik and for Chabat's RRRrrrr!!! . The partnership with Chabat also led to a collaboration on the film Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra , for which he designed the costumes that earned him the 2003 César Award. In 2004 he worked on the animations for the music video for Adriano Celentano's C'è sempre un motivi . In 2008 he designed the characters, costumes and sets for Alessandro Baricco's first film, Lezione ventuno , and in 2012 he also designed for the production of the film Marsupilami based on the iconic comic by André Franquin.

While continuing to illustrate novels, comics and music albums, in the 2000s Liberatore devoted himself more and more frequently to painting, especially with oils and watercolours, exhibiting in galleries and museums throughout Europe. He then returned to drawing for the magazine Il Male , in the new edition directed in 2011 by Vauro and Vincino, and in 2012 the Ranxerox stories were collected for the first time in a complete edition by Comicon Edizioni. For the publisher Glénat he illustrated two classics of French literature, Apollinaire's Eleven Thousand Verges and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal , and created special covers for Italian, French or American productions of novels (Alessandro Baricco, Emiliano D'Alessandro), music albums (La Femme, Shaka Ponk, Maurizio Rolli) or comics (Hit-Girl, Conan, Dylan Dog, Tex). Between 2021 and 2024 he worked on character design and covers for Le storie della paranza by Roberto Saviano and for the comic book adaptation of La seconda metà by Antonio Scurati, while in 2022 he illustrated Lo Scudo di Talos by Valerio Massimo Manfredi. He is working on several new projects, including a return to comics.

It was 1998 when the very first edition of COMICON Napoli took shape within the walls of Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples, presented with a poster signed by the great illustrator and cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti, and the presence of a few, but significant guests. Year after year COMICON Napoli has become bigger and bigger and since 2012, to allow all the public to access the festival, it has moved to the Mostra d'Oltremare. In 2023 COMICON broadened its horizons and landed in Northern Italy with COMICON Bergamo, which will reach its third edition in 2025. Today COMICON is an Italian leader among comics & games festivals and is one of the most well-known and authoritative producers of events, exhibitions and projects related to comics and pop culture in the world. COMICON with its International Pop Culture Festivals attracts every year, between Naples and Bergamo, over 210 thousand visitors passionate about comics, games and video games, anime and manga, cinema and TV series, placing itself among the major multi-sector cultural festivals in Europe and in the world.

In recent months COMICON has also landed in South Korea, as part of a twinning with the international festival BICOF, bringing exhibitions and events to promote comics and animation made in Italy. COMICON's activities are not limited to the two festivals, but continue throughout the year: COMICON produces exhibitions in Italy and abroad (currently, in addition to the three exhibitions scheduled in Korea, open until April 2025, three exhibitions are open: two dedicated to Tanino Liberatore, in Avellino and Pola in Croatia, one to Milo Manara, in Modena), publishes comics with the COMICON Edizioni label, represents internationally renowned artists such as Milo Manara and Tanino Liberatore himself, and is co-founder of the European Network of Comics Festivals and RIFF - Italian Network of Comics Festivals.

COMICON Napoli, which has already received the patronage of the Campania Region and the Municipality of Naples , boasts strategic collaborations, of an institutional nature, with the main national and international associations and federations of the sectors involved and with some major sponsors of world-class caliber. Among the latter, already confirmed ALCOTT , CAFFE' BORBONE , FORST , DITRON and others of international prestige that will be announced shortly.

The media partnership with RAI , which has always followed the international festival with editorials and a dedicated episode of the program Wonderland on RAI 4, is being confirmed .

Among the new partners committed to COMICON is also King Esport , a leading company in the organization of gaming events and tournaments whose program of activities will be revealed at the beginning of 2025.

COMICON pays great attention to the environment, especially recycling. The collaboration with the CIAL Consortium for the recycling of Aluminum packaging and RICREA for the recycling of Steel packaging has been confirmed. Among the novelties of 2025, the arrival of a new Consortium, the COREPLA National Consortium for the Collection, Recycling and Recovery of Plastic Packaging which, together with CIAL and RICREA, will help make COMICON even more eco-friendly .

Finally, to build an increasingly inclusive offering, the festival continues and expands its usual program of events assisted by sign language interpreters, LIS .

Reduced daily ticket 6-11 years: €8.50
Silver pass: €250.00 (more information on napoli.comicon.it )