‘Squid Game’s Hwang Dong-hyuk, Lee Jung-jae & Wi Ha-joon Set For Italy’s Lucca Comics & Games

Jesse Whittock

26 June 2024 at 6:35 am·2-min read

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk and stars Lee Jung-jae and Wi Ha-joon will head to Italy for this year’s Lucca Comics & Games festival.

The trio will meet fans and to news about the highly anticipated second season of the Korean survival thriller on October 31 in the striking Tuscan city of Lucca, according to the event’s organizers.

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Season 2 of Squid Game, which remains the most popular series on Netflix more than two years after its release, is set to launch on Netflix by the end of the year, with a trailer released in February.

Other noteworthy sessions at Lucca this year include appearances by Tatsuya Nagamine, who has directed numerous Toei Animation’s including Fuji TV’s One Piece and Dragon Ball Super: Broly, and fellow anime director Kenji Tokoyama. This comes on the 25th anniversary of the One Piece franchise, which has also been adapted at Netflix with a second season going into production this month. Yesterday, casting on the villains for season 2 was unveiled.

Other features of Lucca, which celebrates gaming and comics with fans and draws in industry folk, include tributes to the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop games, the 40th anniversary of Tetris through a talk with creator Alexey L. Pajitnov and The Tetris Company co-founder Henk B. Rogers, and a world premiere of collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited.

There will also be an exhibition in Milano’s Fabbrica del Vapore taking in more than 100 original works based on the history of anime animator Yoshitaka Amano, whose work has spanned everything from the Tatsunoko TV franchise to the Final Fantasy video games. The exhibition will happen after the festival, running from November 13, 2024 to March 1, 2025.

Amano has designed the poster of this year’s Lucca festival, which is themed around the idea of the ‘The Butterfly Effect,’ the theory that small changes led to big consequences.

The fest bills itself as a “crossroads of different arts” where “comics, games, cinema, literature, and music converge into a multi-sensory experience.”

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