It’s 3:21am and Riccardo (Burchielli, my DMZ artist), Cinzia, and I just rolled into the Hotel Napoleon Lucca after a full day and night out in Lucca. As you can see above, tonight Demo won the Grand Jury Best Short Story Award (for “Emmy”) and Riccardo won Best Artist. I plan on posting something proper about the Lucca con, complete with photos and a full write-up, but since its only been one day so far maybe I’ll write an extra report tomorrow.

I will just say that to say this is the best convention I could have imagined is an understatement. Lucca is a medieval walled city and the convention is literally everywhere - tents are set up in every main street, in every piazza, and in beautiful ancient churches and you stroll around as you please. It’s the most beautiful location ever, and combined with the European outlook on the art of comics and an espresso bar every 50 meters, I never want to leave. Even the worst of the cosplay feels elegant. 25,000 people visited the con today, and they are hoping for a total for the 4 days of over 100k. Lucca is the largest European con next to Angoulême.

Congrats to Becky and Riccardo on the wins. If you feel like poking around on my Flickr, there are pics from my stays in Firenze, Riccardo’s house in the country, and Lucca.

(And to Eric in the comments, I’ve had more than my share of cracks at titles like you suggest, and I am not opposed to taking on work like that in theory, but I’ve been turning it all down because it hasn’t felt right yet. I don’t want to write a company book just for the sake of it.. I don’t think it would be any good unless my heart was in it.)

Bye for now from Lucca, Italy.

-bri

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