British artist Jamie Hewlett is to be a headline guest at COMICON Napoli next year, now reaching its milestone 25th edition, and has provided the stunning art for the event’s poster.
The long four-day festival will be held from 1st to 4th May 2025 at the Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples, Italy, in the wake of the remarkable success of the 2024 edition which attracted 175,000 visitors.
Jamie Hewlett is perhaps best known as the author of the iconic Tank Girl, and for having co-created Gorillaz, the virtual band that became an international sensation, with Damon Albarn.
The protagonist of the poster is Murphy, a girl unflinching fan of comic art, animation and pop culture, ready to do anything to get to her favourite festival!
“Mini Murphy has a missing tooth and a black eye, the trophies of a fun weekend in the woods on her BMX bike,” says Jamie. “However painful, these injuries are not enough to prevent her from attending her favourite gathering, Comicon!”
As tradition dictates, the XXV edition also celebrates a master of Italian comic art, and this year it is one of the finest authors of modern Italian comic art, an artist who contributed to defining the post-punk aesthetic of the 1980s in Italy and Europe: Tanino Liberatore. As the Magister artist for the festival’s upcoming edition, Liberatore will be the subject of a personal exhibition, and will curate an exhibition dedicated to an international comic artist to be revealed in January. He will also be the focus of an extensive programme of talks, meetings and some special initiatives.
International Guests Aplenty!
Also coming to Italy for the first time for COMICON Napoli 2025 is the American author and illustrator Jon J. Muth, best known for some of the most innovative painterly works in comic art such as Moonshadow and Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown, and, more recently, for his delicate and award-winning children’s books like Zen Shorts. Returning to Italy after over 15 years will be Arthur de Pins, the multifaceted French artist and animator known for Péchés mignons, The March of the Crabs, and Zombillénium.
Also announced is Paskim, the Korean author known for the hit webtoon Lost in the Cloud; Darick Robertson, the American comic artist and screenwriter who has been on the scene for over 30 years, the co-creator of Transmetropolitan and the comic turned hit tv series, The Boys; Boichi, the Korean mangaka, author of Sun Ken Rock, Origin and artist of the bestselling Dr. Stone manga, whose anime debuts with its fourth season in January 2025; Thomas Taylor, illustrator and author of children’s books, known for having created the book cover for the first British edition of the Harry Potter tales, and author of the The Eerie-on-Sea Mysteries series of novels; Álvaro Martínez Bueno, the co-creator of the post-apocalyptic horror series The Nice House on The Lake, one of the most awarded comics series at the Eisner Awards and Angouleme’s festival awards in recent years.
All the guests will be the featured in talks, meetings with the audience and autographing sessions.
A place of honour in this edition has been reserved for Altan, illustrator, one of the most beloved and esteemed comic artists and satirical cartoonists of all time in Italy, who will be awarded the COMICON 2025 Special Award for Lifetime Achievement.
On the occasion of the XXV edition, a series of initiatives will celebrate the evolution of the relationship between the festival, the city and comic art, such as the exhibition titled “Napoli: Fumetto Destination”, which focuses on the role played by the city of Naples in the history of the Ninth Art, and how it has inspired some of the foremost Italian and international works and artists, who have explored the thousand faces of a vital, stimulating and complex metropolis that in the year 2025 will celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the foundation of Neapolis in 475 B.C.
Online sales are now open for passes and tickets to COMICON Napoli 2025, the festival that has, over 25 years, established Naples as a leading centre for major comic art and gaming events on the international stage. Tickets and passes may be purchased at ticket.comicon.it.
“With its 25th edition COMICON Napoli presents a fully realised and complete festival, which carries with it the traces of the experiences shared with the visitors who have been part of its journey from the very beginning”, stated Matteo Stefanelli, Artistic Director of COMICON.
“COMICON recognises itself in its audience, as illustrated in the poster created for us by Jamie Hewlett, one of the most influential visual artists in the world. The image of Murphy, the festival’s number one fan, is the portrait of a sister, an ideal friend, one of us. In her, Hewlett portrays not only the passion for comic art and pop culture, but also its undisciplined vitality, its challenge to overcome difficulties and conventions.
“I am thankful to Jamie for the gift he has given to the Italian audience and to us all with this collaboration, as rare as it is precious, which makes us proud of the work we do, forever fuelled by the same spirit as its Murphy. This is yet another reason why COMICON is now announcing its richest lineup of international guests yet, and is doing so earlier than in the past”.
• Tickets for COMICON Napoli are on sale now
The COMICON Napoli poster created by Jamie Hewlett
To celebrate the XXV edition, COMICON Napoli commissioned the creation of the official poster to a great international artist, one of the most renowned and influential image creators of our time, who starting with comic art, animation and music has succeeded in leaving his own unique mark on the visual panorama of contemporary culture.
The focus of the poster by Jamie Hewlett, author of the iconic Tank Girl, a cult character in post-punk comic art, and co-creator with Damon Albarn of the virtual band Gorillaz, is Murphy. A girl who is both a nerd and a punk, whose face is inspired by Alfred E. Neuman, the legendary mascot of MAD Magazine. Murphy is an authentic nerd who carries on her the signs of her great passions, in the T-shirts, patches and pins with which Hewlett represents animation series, comics, films and music which have nurtured her coming of age and that of an entire generation, artists and fans united by their passion for Hayao Miyazaki or Robert Crumb, Calvin & Hobbes or Watchmen, Tanino Liberatore or Daniel Clowes. A metaphor for the unbridled enthusiasm and vital energy that comic art and pop culture bring to us all. Murphy has the courage and the brazenness to claim it all, expressing the joy of being “fan n.1”!
Born in 1968, Jamie Hewlett is a prolific creative who defies easy categorisation. Working at an unrelenting pace for over three decades he has often captured the zeitgeist with his pioneering, energetic work. Hewlett presents a paradox: he’s very serious about art which doesn’t take itself seriously, and he’s part of a globally recognisable cultural phenomenon but is constantly reinventing his artistic language.
Hewlett is best known for co-creating the internationally successful virtual band Gorillaz, with Damon Albarn. The award-winning group broke new ground by refusing to adhere to an industry obsessed with real-life celebrity, instead Hewlett makes and remakes the band’s characters and environments in cartoon format including legendary live action stage animations. He first rose to prominence in the late 1980s with the anarchic comic strip that centred a powerful and unrepenting female protagonist – the first of its kind – with “Tank Girl”.
An artistic polymath, Hewlett moves between the worlds of design, art and music, and blends a multitude of global cultural influences in work which always adopts a punk-like sensibility. Hewlett openly quotes a variety of sources from hip hop to opera and from zombie slasher movies to westerns.
Hewlett’s impact extends beyond visual art and music; he’s also known for his work in advertising and activism, including projects on environmental issues. Hewlett was awarded the Jim Henson Creativity Honour in 2005 and Designer of the Year by London’s Design Museum in 2006. In 2007, Hewlett designed an elaborate staging of the Chinese novel Monkey: Journey to the West by Damon Albarn and Wu Cheng’en which premiered at the Manchester International Festival. In 2009, Hewlett and Albarn won a BAFTA for their animated Monkey sequence for the Beijing Olympic Games. In 2015 Hewlett exhibited his work at The Suggestionists, a solo exhibition of prints at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2017 Taschen published a large format monograph of Hewlett’s work across 25 years. This was followed by The Gorillaz Art Book in 2022 where Hewlett’s original creations were joined by over 40 artists he invited to make work inspired by the world of Gorillaz.
• Jamie Hewlett is online at jamiehewlett.com
The 2025 ‘Magister’ Artist: Tanino Liberatore
Tanino Liberatore is one of the most celebrated masters of modern Italian comics, and an artist who helped define the post-punk aesthetic of the 1980s in Italy and Europe. Born in Abruzzo, in Quadri, Liberatore went on to attend art school in Pescara after high school. He then moved to Rome to study architecture and began working for several advertising agencies, producing a plethora of record covers for musicians published by RCA such as Ivan Graziani, Nada, Gilda Giuliani or Gianni Morandi.
In 1978, Andrea Pazienza, his high school classmate, invited him to join the incredible experience of the underground magazine Cannibale. He published his first comics on the pages of this legendary self-produced magazine, drawing stories written by Stefano Tamburini. Here Tamburini, Liberatore, and Pazienza brought us Rank Xerox, an utterly bizarre android, and a kind of punk Frankenstein. In 1980, the character moved on to Frigidaire magazine, where he changed his name to Ranxerox after a warning from the copier company of the same name. Liberatore is now entirely in charge of the artwork, giving the character his definitive graphic identity: explosive and hypertrophic. Ranx has achieved cult status, becoming an iconic work of art. Its ultra-violent imagery and generational themes resonate deeply within Italian creative culture, influencing fashion, music, cinema, TV and post-avantgarde theater. In the latter field, Liberatore designed the sets and costumes for the play “On the road” (1982) by the company Magazzini Criminali.
His work in film and television, in particular, began to be in much demand: he wass commissioned, for example, to design the poster for the European release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and then for Liliana Cavani’s The Skin. Although these images were not published, other projects soon followed: in 1982 he designed the sets for the Rai1 television programme Mister Fantasy, hosted by Carlo Massarini, and in 1983 he signed the poster for Peter Del Monte’s Invitation au voyage.
In 1982, Liberatore relocated to Paris, where he continued to create stories and covers for Il Male and Frigidaire. He also worked remotely with Tamburini on the adventures of Ranxerox, which was picked up by major international comics magazines, from L’Echo des Savanes to Heavy Metal to El Vibora, turning a generational cult into a global success. Frank Zappa was also a devoted fan of Liberatore’s work. He approached him with a proposal to collaborate, and Liberatore accepted: Zappa himself appeared, portrayed in “Ranxerox style”, on the cover of his album The Man from Utopia. In 1985 Andrea Pazienza went so far as to make him the protagonist of one of his stories, “The Legend of Italianino Liberatore.”
Throughout the 1980s, Liberatore’s work gradually focused more on illustration than comics. In publishing, he illustrated the covers of Joël Houssin’s Dobermann noir novels and drew for magazines such as Transfert, Chic and Hustler. For cinema, he worked on Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters, visualizing the ghosts of the famous movie. In fashion, he worked on advertising campaigns for brands such as Moschino, Citroën, Escada, Energie.
Sadly, Tamburini passed away in 1986, leaving the last story of the “synthetic thrash” unfinished. Liberatore returned to comics only in the mid-1990s, publishing new stories for L’Echo des Savanes and a special episode for the event series of the year, Batman Black & White. He then returned to work on Ranxerox with the help of his friend, actor and director, Alain Chabat, with whom he developed the idea left unfinished by Tamburini. By the end of the 1990s, Liberatore began experimenting with digital tools for drawing and coloring. He created Lucy – L’Espoir (The Hope), a graphic novel about the origins of mankind written by Patrick Norbert, that will be released in 2007 after a process that lasted about a decade.
Following an appearance in Chabat’s movie Didier, cinema became a regular field of action for Liberatore. He acted in Rémi Bezançon’s short films and in Kiki Picasso’s experimental film Traitement de substitution n°4, and provided sets and costumes designs for Laurent Bouhnik’s 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman and for Chabat’s RRRrrrr!!!. The partnership with Chabat also led to the film Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, for which he designed the costumes that won him the 2003 César Award.
In 2004 he worked on the animations for Adriano Celentano’s videoclip C’è sempre un motivo. In 2008, he was responsible for the design of the characters, costumes, and sets for Alessandro Baricco’s first film, Lecture 21, and in 2012, he also got to design for the production of the film Marsupilami, based on André Franquin’s iconic comics series.
While he continued to illustrate novels, comic books, and music albums, in the 2000s Liberatore turned increasingly to painting, especially oils and watercolours, and exhibited in galleries and museums across Europe and the United States. He then resumed his contributions for Il Male magazine in 2011, working for the new edition edited by Vauro and Vincino.
In 2012, the Ranxerox stories were collected for the first time in a complete edition by Comicon Edizioni.
For French publisher Glénat, he has illustrated two classics of French literature: Apollinaire’s Eleven Thousand Rods and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. He continues to create special covers for Italian, French, and American productions of novels (Alessandro Baricco, Emiliano D’Alessandro), music albums (La Femme, Shaka Ponk, Maurizio Rolli) or comic books (Hit-Girl, Conan the Barbarian, Dylan Dog, Tex). From 2021 to 2024, he provided character design and cover artwork for Roberto Saviano’s Le storie della paranza and for the graphic novel adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s La seconda mezzanotte. In 2022, he illustrated Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s Spartan.
He currently has many projects in the works. One of them is a return to comics.
• Follow Tanino Liberatore on Facebook | Instagram
• Tickets for COMICON Napoli are on sale now
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The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.
He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.
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