Barcelona (EFE).- The 29th edition of Manga Barcelona will consolidate its new headquarters in the next edition, the Gran Vía Barcelona Fair, although it will be reorganized and expanded to include even more activities and increase the number of visitors, its general director, Meritxell Puig, announced this Wednesday.
The great event for fans of manga, anime and Japanese culture will take place from December 7 to 10 at the Gran Vía Fair in Barcelona, where it landed for the first time in the last edition and where it received 163,000 visitors.
To illustrate the poster for this new edition of Manga Barcelona, one of the most popular local authors, Míriam Bonastre, a native of Pineda de Mar and trained at the Joso School, has successfully published the youth comic “Hooky” on the Webtoon platform, whose paper version has appeared on The New York Times best-seller lists and has positioned her as the best-selling comic book author in Europe in 2022.
Bonastre wanted to reflect in his poster “the massive and positive atmosphere that exists in Manga Barcelona, as well as the return of that closer contact” that they had “missed in past editions”.
The poster shows some of the key elements of the event, “such as manga, video games, cosplay, Japanese food and also this point of union between different generations that the room represents.”
Although FICOMIC, the organizer of the event, is still working on the invitations to the artists who will visit the show this year, today it confirmed the Japanese singer-songwriter Vicke Blanka, responsible for one of the overtures of the “Black Clover” series, on the Grand Stage.
Umaru, a well-known manga disseminator, will attend as an official guest but as an author, because she has just published a book in which she explains her experience with dyslexia and how manga helped her regain her love of reading.
The success of some of the talks and meetings, as well as that of the editorial presentations, has led the organization to reorganize the spaces: “The room that until now had been converted into a movie theater has become the space dedicated to editorial presentations, one of the activities that arouses the most passion at Manga Barcelona, and will also be a meeting place for authors and artists and for the most massive proposals, such as the Manga Barcelona Awards ceremony.”
Precisely, Puig commented, this year there will be two new categories in the awards: Best Manga published in Catalan and Best Anime with Catalan Dubbing.
The event continues to bet on the projection of anime, and for this reason a room with more capacity than the last edition will be opened and conditioned, so that the public can continue enjoying successful films or even premieres of the most recent productions.
In this new Manga Barcelona Auditorium, the latest Detective Conan film, “Black Iron Submarine”, “Utena, the revolutionary girl” will be screened. Teenage Apocalypse” and the 2013 film “Captain Harlock: Space Pirate” will be recovered, the latter within the tribute to the figure of Leiji Matsumoto, who died last February.
This 2023 marks the 35th anniversary of the premiere of one of the most popular Japanese animated films in the world, “My neighbor Totoro”, and the tribute will consist of the screening of the film, as well as the exhibition “My neighbor Totoro. 35 visions”, curated by Jordi Pastor and Reinaldo Pereira, which includes 35 works by as many national artists who pay homage or reinterpretation of the mythical character Totoro.
Manga Barcelona will also host the Spanish final of the K-Pop Dance Fight Fest choreography contest, whose winners will travel as representatives of Spain in the European final to be held in Naples at the end of April 2024.
The gastronomic space will continue with the usual proposals for demonstrations and snacks, an offer that will be completed with the “Itadakimanga!” exhibition.
The show opens another new space, “Manga Stream”, which will accommodate podcasts, live interviews with guests and other proposals, some of which will be broadcast live on the Manga Barcelona channels.
Tickets for Manga Barcelona will go on sale from July 27 through the website http://www.mangabarcelona.com.