Lucca Comics & Games Turns 60: The Exhibitions of the 2026 Edition
Lucca Comics & Games 2026 is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday together with its legendary community, from Wednesday, October 28 through Sunday, November 1. Sixty years of history and creativity, of diversity and inclusion, of change, of evolutions and metamorphoses, of art and, above all, of community. A community on the move, whose story cannot be aimed at the past but has to look to the future
The “Diamond” anniversary is not only a chance to celebrate the past: it is the moment to understand what Lucca Comics & Games has built together with the people who have lived it over these six decades and with those who will live it next, discovering together what might come after. In sixty years it was not just a fair or a festival that grew up: comics, games and fantasy culture have been a gym for the imagination for entire generations, and that heritage of values, stories and dreams now makes up an inheritance to hand down to the new generations, the LEGACY of Lucca Comics & Games, the theme of this edition.
Legacy as inheritance, as the passing of the baton, a real patrimony of life, childhood, discoveries, culture and change that, to quote Gianni Rodari, will let anyone who wants to grow up learn the grammar of the world. But also Legacy as in those board games where every session changes the board permanently, and whoever plays today changes the way everybody else will play tomorrow. This is what the community of visitatAutori — “visitor-authors,” the word the festival uses for its audience — has been doing for six decades, and this is the true soul of Lucca Comics & Games: receiving an imaginary world and rewriting it, making it your own.
The curious childhood of the 1970s, the explosive youth of 1980s comics, the cross-pollinations of the ’90s, the digital metamorphosis of the 2000s, the expansion of the 2010s. Then the hardest test of all: 2020, the year when everything stopped, when the festival chose not to disappear and turned its challenges into opportunities. The comeback, the rebirth. The will to keep going with a story that is not only nostalgia, but constant evolution and change.
A collective biography that cut the furrow for what is today the imagination of global pop culture, and that this year wants to go back to its origins and to its places. Italy, where Lucca Comics & Games was born in 1966 and became a landmark of Made in Italy, crossing its own borders over the years to become the place where you experiment, meet, love, make friends, grow up and play, guided by an ideal of inclusion, united in diversity. Exactly as the motto of the European Union puts it, the one whose values the festival shares: it is in fact the European Commission that is backing this edition, putting our country and the worldwide resonance of the event at the center.
The affiche for the 60th edition — the first and only example of a meta-poster, presented this morning during the press conference held at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence (the Uffizi Galleries) and organized together with the museum, the treasure chest of the Italian Renaissance — is signed by Claudio Castellini, an absolute master of international comics and the living embodiment of the history of Lucca Comics & Games.
An exhibition devoted to Claudio Castellini: Tocchi da Maestro
Claudio Castellini, one of the masters of Italian and international comics, is famous for his dynamic style and for the extraordinary anatomical power of his figures. The first Italian artist to work steadily for the American market, Castellini redefined the aesthetics of modern superheroics.
The exhibition Claudio Castellini: Tocchi da Maestro traces the milestones of his career through a selection of original pages: from his beginnings at Bonelli, where his name became inseparable from the graphic birth of Nathan Never and from two cult issues of Dylan Dog, all the way to his historic collaborations with Marvel and DC Comics on iconic characters such as Silver Surfer, Conan, Batman and the legendary Marvel vs DC crossover. The show, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of the Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca, offers a close reading of his millimetric technique, focusing on his study of chiaroscuro and on the muscular plasticity that turned his line into a global reference point.
The exhibitions at Palazzo Guinigi
For Lucca’s 60th anniversary, Palazzo Guinigi devotes an entire floor to Legacy – La mostra
An entire floor of the historic Palazzo Guinigi — the second — will be turned into a cultural platform with adaptive, permanent display devices designed to evolve over time, partly through the involvement of the public. This is the space that will host the first big exhibition celebrating the 60 years of Lucca Comics & Games. An unprecedented project, developed in partnership with POLI.design, the postgraduate school founded by the Politecnico di Milano, an educational ecosystem at the top of the international rankings in the Art & Design area. A collaboration marked by strong design and institutional credentials, bringing together vision, method and international prestige to give shape to a cultural platform in the heart of the city of Lucca. An exhibition that will itself be LEGACY, evolving and interacting with its visitors. An interactive experience telling a collective story that is past and future at once. Just like the players of legacy games, visitors will be able to step into the show and “change” it permanently. The call to action for Lucca Comics & Games fans opens today: anyone who wants to can send in a video telling the story of their first Lucca. A selection will be screened in a special area of the exhibition, My first Lucca, which will keep changing too (here is the link to the call to action: https://bit.ly/4xEfXzQ).
Faster than his own shadow: 80 years of Lucky Luke
In 1946, in the pages of the Journal de Spirou, a gunslinger able to shoot faster than his own shadow made his debut. Eighty years later, Lucca Comics & Games is honored to celebrate the birthday of Lucky Luke, the legendary character born from the graphic and narrative genius of Morris.
Straight from the Master’s archives, visitors will be able to admire an extraordinary selection of original pages and historic covers showing the epic of the West from a completely unexpected point of view. It will be a unique chance to meet again the horse Jolly Jumper, the “faithful” dog Rantanplan and the ever-resurrecting Dalton brothers, but also to run into historical figures such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane: fictional heroes and real protagonists of the frontier, all of them filtered through the Author’s distorting, ironic lens.
An exhibition path that will lead into the heart of the “comedy western” invented by Morris, a genre that became a reference point and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for comics, cinema and literature. The rooms of Palazzo Guinigi will turn into the ideal set where Native Americans, outlaws, sheriffs, undertakers and saloon dancers will welcome the public, carrying it straight inside their fascinating world. Thanks for their collaboration go to: Éditions Dupuis, Philippe Blanckaert, Antoine Mathon, Fanny Blanckaert.
The Lucky Luke celebrations continue… Sergio Bonelli Editore is also marking the 80 years of the famous cowboy Lucky Luke with a brand-new adventure drawn by Giorgio Cavazzano and written by Marco Nucci. An all-Italian homage to the myth of the gunslinger created by Morris in 1946, available starting from Lucca Comics & Games 2026.
Tillie Walden: Time Capsule
A voice of Generation Z, the American cartoonist Tillie Walden stands out on the international scene for the maturity with which she handles coming-of-age themes, the inventiveness with which she explores what the language of comics can do, and the sensitivity with which she tells delicate, intimate stories.
The author will be at Lucca Comics & Games for the first time in Italy, in collaboration with Bao Publishing, from October 28 to November 1.
Born in 1996, in 2018 she became one of the youngest winners of an Eisner Award with Spinning (published in Italy as Trottole, Oscar INK), the autobiographical book that made her famous in Italy, centered on the world of figure skating and on the search for her own identity. In 2021 Are You Listening? (Bao Publishing) won her another prestigious Eisner Award, for Best Graphic Album. With the young adult trilogy Clementine, a spin-off of The Walking Dead (SaldaPress), she was included in the 2024 selection of the Lucca Comics Awards. In September 2026, BAO Publishing brings to Italy Charity and Sylvia, a graphic novel between fiction and history that tells the courage and the struggles of two lesbian women in early nineteenth-century Vermont.
The show offers a detailed picture of the author’s stylistic evolution, focusing on her narrative use of color, on the way she builds her settings and on her complex psychological investigation of the characters.
We at FUL magazine will be there and we can’t wait to see them!
See you in Lucca
