Manga Barcelona expects a record edition

At the end of this July they will be able to start acquiring tickets for the next Manga Barcelona from the festival website. There will still be several months for the great festival of Japanese comics and culture to return, which this year changes its dates to be celebrated from December 8 to 11, but the expectations, according to its director, Meritxell Puig, “are to exceed the visitor numbers of the last edition before the pandemic, that of 2019, that of the 25th anniversary, in which there were almost 153,000 attendees.” Last year, even in a pandemic, 122,000 visitors were reached.

Reasons are not lacking to wait for these figures of an appointment that will mean “the return to normality”. On the one hand, the festival also changes location, leaves Fira Montjuïc to move to three pavilions of Fira Gran Via L’Hospitaletwhere it will occupy a whopping 82,000 square meters. For another, the ‘mangamania’ that the sector has experienced in recent months, with sales records and published titles and a ‘boom’ of readers, especially young people, who have been launched since the pandemic to consume manga and anime.

The guests

Puig, and Oriol Estrada, responsible for the show’s content, have presented the program preview, although they have not yet revealed the names of the guests “because although many are 95% confirmed until September, they will not be 100% confirmed and the Japanese are very cautious. They want to see how the summer evolves and are awaiting possible ‘tours’ of authors around Europe”. It will be then in a couple of months that the names of ‘mangakas’, anime directors and other foreign artists will be known, but some of the cartoonists here are already known, such as the Carles Dalmau, Laia López or Sara Lozoya (Madrid, 1996), author of the poster of this 28th edition, which was unveiled this Tuesday.

the poster

“I have tried to symbolize the illusion with which the room is lived and what it brings me, the joy, the chaotic atmosphere, the manga and all the traditional things of Japan by fusing it with fantasy elements, with ‘cosplayers’, the food… “, Lozoya explained before the poster, where a boy and a girl interact with a fox, a ‘kitsune’ in Japanese, a typical animal of Japanese folklore.

The new location in Fira Gran Via, which is now served by lines 9 and 10 of the metro as well as buses and Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, will offer more rooms for presentations, grassy spaces and an indoor stage (safe from inclement weather). weather). they will return activities always, with music, contests, workshops, cinema, gastronomy spaces, talks and the long-awaited license announcements, and manga in Catalan will continue to be talked about, for which publishers such as Planeta Manga or Norma are already betting.

the young readers

The Manga Kids It will also continue, with activities for children and families, but another section will also be launched for the more ‘teens’, that is, readers from 10 years old and adolescents, who are the ones who are now promoting the ‘boom’ of the sector and they are, Estrada recalls, the readers of the future that we are interested in preserving.

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In terms of exhibitions, for now there has been one on the relationship between manga and gastronomy and another on ties with sports.

the tickets

While the marketing of stands and exhibitors is starting now, tickets will have to wait until the end of the month. That there is time until December will avoid, according to Puig, what happened in the past Manga Barcelona, ​​which due to the uncertainty of the pandemic could not be put on sale until a couple of weeks before the start of the fair and that caused an avalanche of demand , running out quickly and leaving many fans without them. In addition, this time without capacity restrictions due to covid there will be more tickets available. In the three previous editions, which went on sale the previous summer, the show was also sold out, the director recalled.