2006 is the 8th year of the Comics and Animation Fair in Naples. It will focus on Great Britain and Germany. In the first weekend in March comics and cinema will return to crowd the beautiful rooms of Castel Sant’Elmo and the whole of Naples with exhibitions, reviews and unmissable events, organised together with the Soprintendenza per il Polo Museale and official institutions and Cultural Institutes in Naples.
The great Anglo-Saxon comics tradition will be under the spotlights of Napoli COMICON. British authors of the last decades have been leaders in the art of writing by images, the screenplay. We will focus in particular on the role of the Vertigo line, created by the American DC Comics, the company which imported more British talents than any other. Nella mente dello scrittore, the main exhibition, will analyse the creative path of a comics writer, from the idea to the storyboard, from the inspiration to the writing of the text, through the authors who started the age of graphic novels: people like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Chris Claremont, but also authors such as Gary Spencer Millidge and David Lloyd. The strength of the COMICON exhibitions is in the combination of original tables and impact scenografies. The usual historical exhibition, Gli eredi di Ally Sloper: appunti sul fumetto inglese, will illustrate England’s fundamental contribute to the art of comics and illustration. It will cover the period from the beginning of this century to date. Similar attention will be dedicated to Germany, whose comics art is in full creative and editorial bloom. The main exhibition, I Figli di Max e Moritz, is organised together with the prestigious Frankfurt Buchmesse and the Goethe Institut in Naples, which will host it. The authors exhibited are: Matthias Schultheiss, Ralf Konig, Isabel Kreitz, Anke Feuchtenberger, Uli Osterle, Ulf K., Flix, Thomas von Kummant and Christina Plaka. Nine new German talents (Mawil, Diceindustries, Oliver Grajewski, Ulli Lust Kai Pfeiffer, Kati Rickenbach, Line Hoven, Arne Bellstorf, Sascha Hommer) will be partially translated and will form part of an itinerant exhibition.
And finally the new Italian talents Piero Macola, Manuele Fior, Antonella Toffolo, Amanda Vahamaki, Michelangelo Setola, Giacomo Monti, Alessandro Tota, Francesco Cattani, Manuel De Carli, Sara Pavan, Paolo Parisi will be exhibited in the fifth edition of Futuro Anteriore.

GUESTS: FROM VERTIGO TO THE GERMAN AVANT GARDE
Many international guests will animate the fair. As well as Jamie Delano, Chris Claremont, Gary Spencer Millidge, David Lloyd and the German Ralf Konig, Flix and Nicolas Mahler, we will see many young authors, among which Dice, Kati Rickenbach, Oliver Grajewski, Kai Pfeiffer, Ulli Lust, Mawil. Many Italian artists such as Diego Cajelli, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Alfredo Castelli, Marco Corona, Gianluca Costantini, Gipi, Lorenzo Ruggiero, Giorgio Cavazzano, Tito Faraci, Luca Enoch and the Europeans Baru and Jose Villarrubia. We will also see professionals like Karen Berger, Vice-President and Executive Editor of Vertigo, DC Comics, and Richard Bruning, Senior Vice-President and Creative Director of DC.
The Italian and French publishers Red Whale, Bruno Lecigne and Nicola Forsans for Les Humanoides Associés, Gisele de Haan for Albin Michel, and Claude Gendrot for Dupuis will participate, together with the German publishers Sylvia Schuster and Anne Berling of the Carlsen Comics. They will form a highly qualified professional forum not only for Italy and Europe, but for the rest of the world’s comics world.
All authors and professionals are invited to send us expressions of interest by filling in the form on our site http://www.comicon.it.

CINEMA
We will have presentations of experimental British and German animation, like X-Men: The Last Stand, by Brett Ratner, the third episode of the saga dedicated to the Marvel mutants, V for Vendetta, a Warner distribution, written and produced by the Wachowski brothers, directed by James McTeigue. It is based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, a political imaginary fiction of the ‘80s.
One section will be completely dedicated to Jimmy, with programmes from the satellite channel. A specific programme will be dedicated to the relation between Music and Animation, with Giannalberto Bendazzi. An important presentation will be that of the Neapolitan series Il Principe di Sansereno, produced by Tilapia, which will be on the Rai channels. Brand New! Screening will offer distributors the chance to present their products to the specialist audience of the Fair. The project will be dedicated to animation, genre films, fiction, horror, adventure and films for children. A special space will be dedicated to foreign producers for films which have not been distributed in Italy yet.

EVENTS
Spazio Disney is a new space dedicated to Buena Vista Lab, the new series of Disney Italia’s graphic novels. The visitors of Napoli COMICON will admire Giorgio Cavazzano’s drawings, based on texts by Tito Faraci, for Jungle Town, the fourth Disney’s graphic novel.

COMIC(ON)OFF will list all fringe events happening in Naples during the fair: exhibitions at Grenoble, in shops and restaurants, at the Polo della Qualità in Caserta, at Feltrinelli Libri&Musica; at Neapolitan cinemas and the Goethe Institute. The Accademia di Belle Arti will host an exhibition on Mahler and a workshop on Flash animation held by Mahler himself.