Poster
FRENCH KISS: the theme of Lucca 2025
This year, Lucca Comics & Games is proud to honour the homeland of bande dessinée by featuring a French expression made up of two words, universally acknowledged: FRENCH KISS. "The French kiss” is a symbolic gesture that transcends stories, cultures, and generations. Both intimate and revolutionary, it remains essential in every facet of pop culture—from cinema to fantasy and graphic novels." The French kiss is a small, instinctive act—but also a narrative trigger: it unveils hidden identities, brings together opposites, and breaks spells. The kiss is a moment of emotional and physical connection that transforms difference into desire and draws opposites together. It is the most human and deep form of contact that every visitor seeks at our festival, where passion thrives and brings people together. This commitment to bonds and their strength inspired this year’s poster created by the great French illustrator Rébecca Dautremer.
2025 Promotion Poster: six characters looking for a kiss
Considered by the community as a great celebration of tolerance, freedom and hospitality, Lucca Comics & Games manages to unite very different people. During the festival, everyone can freely express themselves through their disguises, the characters they play and their imagination. Rébecca Dautremer was inspired by this setting and atmosphere for her poster which recalls the time when she was welcomed for a personal exhibition in 2012. For this reason, Dautremer chose not to limit herself to a single image, but she created a gallery of characters, moving away from the fairytale style for which she is known. A Werewolf, a Warrior, a Vampire Countess, a Monster, a Witch, and the Lukawa, an imaginary creature that fuses the name of the city of Lucca with the oriental influence of manga and animation. Six characters in search of a visit-Author who, as in Pirandello's drama, break the "fourth wall", enter the scene and meet in a poster that becomes the theater of fifteen possible kisses. All the imaginable combinations between them come to life, in a web of stories, frozen in the moment just before contact. Passion has no rules, bringing together creatures that are typically separated by nature, role, or appearance. Because the kiss, in the best stories, can transform tension into bond and become a sign of the encounter between different souls, of the attraction between apparently incompatible worlds. With this project, Rébecca Dautremer best embodies the spirit of French sequential art, the bande Dessinée that combines aesthetic refinement, artisanal care and narrative invention.
Making of
Rebecca Dautremer: a career driven by creative freedom
Rebecca Dautremer is an author well known for her illustrations for children and her acclaimed books such as Princesses oubliées ou inconnues (The secret lives of princesses). She has since broadened her repertoire by creating illustrated editions of Seta (Silk) and Of Mice and Men by Baricco and Steinbeck, as well as the Jacominus Gainsborough series, in which she explores the boundaries between illustrated book, theatre show and multimedia art. The series also features leporello panoramas, original music composed by her son and magnificent stage machines built by her carpenter father.
Rebecca told us about all of this in her studio-home in Brittany: a place full of memories, creative freedom, warmth and imagination. Here, she showed us her new project i.e her first comic book, the pages of which will be previewed at Lucca 2025. This new work once again proves her desire to experiment, change shape and reinvent herself. With the grace, the passion and the elegance of someone who knows that, if you really want to kiss or create, you must pour yourself completely into it.
