La Laguna hosts from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th April, the second International Manga and Comic Fair, an event organised by the Cine+Cómics Foundation, in collaboration with the Moebius Cultural Chair of the University of La Laguna, and the support of the City Council of La Laguna.
The Fair was presented this Tuesday by the Mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, the Councillor for Culture, Adrián del Castillo, and the president of the Cine+Cómics Foundation, Francisco Pomares.
‘When presenting the first International Manga and Comic Fair, we said that this event was here to stay in La Laguna and a year later we are here, reaffirming the commitment of the City Council of La Laguna to the world of comics as a first class cultural event,’ said the mayor, noting that this initiative brings together more than forty exhibitions of enormous level (twice as many as in its first edition) in heritage spaces such as the Casa de los Capitanes and the Casa Anchieta.
‘In addition, the Plaza del Adelantado will once again become the focal point of the Fair, where the commercial area will be set up, with shops and a space for artists in which more than sixty creators will participate and sell their work,’ announced the mayor.
Francisco Pomares emphasised the ‘international status of the Fair’, which in this second edition has the Japanese artist Shintaro Kago as its main guest, pointing out that ‘he is considered the best-known mangaka of the moment, winner of an award at the recent Angouleme Comic Fair, the most important in Europe’. The artist will take part in several activities at the Casa Anchieta: on Thursday, at 18:00, he will have a signing session; on Friday, at 19:30, he will give a public interview conducted by the journalist Águeda Ruíz de la Fuente, after which there will be another signing session, and on Saturday he will give a master class (18:00), culminating the day with another signing session (19:30). In addition, the mangaka will have a permanent space where he will give commissions and attend to fans, with a schedule that will be updated every day, at the request of the author.
The guest list also includes important authors who reside in the Archipelago and who will participate in various events at the Casa de los Capitanes Generales. On Thursday 24th, Patricio Ducha will give a talk on Batman at 11:30 am. Later, at 16:30, Filomena de Martino will present ‘El Pierrot?’, a Canarian manga published by Ediciones Idea. On Friday 25th, David Torres de Miguel will do the same with his comic ‘Gladiadores de piscina’, at 11:30 am, and Oriol Mir, PhD student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, will give a talk on ‘El hentai desde el mundo académico’, at 16:30 pm. On the same day, at 18:00, Patricio Ducha and Eduardo Serradilla will give a talk on ‘Akira’. On Saturday 26th, also in the Casa de los Capitanes, the Fair will host an activity of Encounters with Authors at 12:00, with the participation of the authors Patricia Martín, Ero Pinku and Moño. Later, at 16:30, Patricio Ducha and Eduardo Serradilla will once again give a talk on Osamu Tezuka and Astroboy.
Other guests at the Fair are part of the signing sessions that will take place in the Plaza del Adelantado, distributed in two schedules. The first meeting will be on Saturday 26th, at 17:00, with Carolina Bonino (‘Fin de la primera parte’ and ‘Cómo está el patio’), Eduardo González (‘Dentro de la noche’, ‘Mararía’, by Rafael Arozarena or ‘La pistola que Millán Astray le regaló a mi abuelo’), Filomena de Martino (‘El Pierrot? ‘), Moño (’Popurrí o Burrow‘), Irene Morales (’Anécdotas tontas y otras historias‘) and Elvira Piedra (’Mitologink’). The following day, at 11 a.m., Ibrahim Castillo and Jonathan Díaz (R&R Show) and David Torres de Miguel (‘Gladiadores de piscina’) will perform, and Carolina Bonino and Moño will repeat.
The full programme of La Laguna es Cómic can be consulted directly on the Cine+Cómics Foundation website, where all the indoor and outdoor activities are listed, including timetables and venues. The social networks of the entity, especially the Instagram account, will also share what these proposals are, the invited guests and other news related to the Fair.
A large ‘artist alley’, open-air activities and more than forty exhibitions.
As was the case in the last edition, the Plaza del Adelantado will once again become the nerve centre of La Laguna es Cómic, as this is where the commercial area will be located, consisting of shops and a large ‘artist alley’ which can be visited from Friday to Sunday and where more than sixty creators will be selling their work. In this space, there will also be a large stage where activities such as three k-pop competitions will take place: two on Saturday 26th, one in the duo category (12:00) and another in the group category (18:00), and the third, individual, on Sunday 27th at 12:00. On the last day, at 18:00, the cosplay catwalk will take place. Other activities that will take place in the square are the children’s dynamisation, carried out by the company Don Globoso, and role-playing games, which are once again organised by the Asociación de Roler@s de Canarias (ARC).
As for the exhibitions, this is once again one of the highlights of the fair, as the organisers have prepared more than forty to be installed in the Casa de los Capitanes Generales, where there will be those dedicated to ‘Masters of the Universe’, and the Casa Anchieta, where there will be displays dedicated to titles such as Astroboy, by Osamu Tezuka; Nana, by Ai Yazawa; or Dan Da Dan, by Yukinobu Tatsu. Other exhibitions dedicated to Chris Claremont, Spawn, La Cúpula Editorial or even the Asociación de Humoristas Gráficos y Caricaturistas de Canarias (Association of Graphic Humorists and Caricaturists of the Canary Islands) will bring the public closer to comics made in the West.
The MOTU Friends arrive from Germany
The proposal offered by the Foundation also includes the meeting The MOTU Friends, a convention traditionally held in Germany and which, for the first time, is coming to Spain. The meeting, which is dedicated to Mattel’s ‘Masters of the Universe’ franchise, will offer a number of activities on 26 and 27 April and will bring together the following guests: the photographer Raúl Barrero, the German illustrator Nino Ade, the publisher Mustafa Ceyhan, the youtuber Luis ReCoiL, the collector Néstor González and those responsible for the original convention, Chriss Tainment and Daniel Weisker. Among the exhibits are eleven panel reproductions and a large collection of dolls from Mattel’s famous toy collection, from every decade since its origin in the 1980s.