Lucca (Italy) (AFP)

For some it is a simple hobby but for others it is a way of being, even an art of living: the "cosplay", practice of disguising itself as a fictional character, has become a cultural phenomenon that has spread throughout the world.

Thousands of fans of cosplay - the contraction of the English words "costume" and "play" (game) - meet regularly at conventions organized from Japan to the United States, via Europe, as they do. is the case until Sunday in Lucca (Lucca in Italian), in Tuscany.

Born in 1966 as a comic book festival, the Lucca Comics and Games, held annually on Halloween, is today one of the most important European festivals dedicated to the 9th Art, to animation and video or role playing.

Over the streets of this fortified city, visitors - they were 400,000 last year - can see walking heroes of Japanese manga, Comics or Marvel Americans, in costumes that cosplayers have sometimes taken months to make their own, bringing a minute care to every detail.

"We watch movies, we focus on a character, his personality and when donning his costume, it's like entering his skin, knowing it from the inside and it's downright exhilarating," he explains. AFP Federico Pepe, aka Deadpool, the anti-hero from Marvel, known for his megalomania and arrogance.

"What I like about him is precisely the fact that he is against the current, a little vulgar, it is a character trait that looks like me," jokes behind his mask red and black this thirties, emergency doctor in Emilia-Romagna in real life.

Born in the 1970s in the United States with the first fans of Star Wars or Star Trek, the phenomenon of cosplayers then developed in Japan, with manga, before becoming more popular in the world.

- Profession: cosplayer -

He has also professionalized, via social networks, some cosplayers who manage to monetize their image or to be paid for the promotion of products for brands. Others choose to specialize in making bespoke suits, the most sophisticated of which can be billed several thousand euros.

This universe also counts its stars like the Americans Jessica Nigri (30 years old) and Yaya Han (39 years old) or the Japanese Enako who, in 2016, was the first cosplayer to reveal her gains of 10.000 dollars per month.

In recent years, the practice of copslay has generated new followers among fans of television series like Games of Thrones, followed in more than 170 countries.

Among them, Natalia Trecanova, a Russian thirty-something resident in Florence, participates in the Lucca Comics and Games dressed in the blue tunic and silver hair hairstyle of Daenerys Targaryen, the heroine of the fantastico-medieval saga born from the imagination of the American novelist George RR Martin.

"I like the side both reserved and authoritarian character," says the young cosplayer AFP.

A fan of the series since her first season in 2011, she says she has been involved in the adventure with her husband, who wears the cape of Jon Snow (another hero of the series) and his little twins, disguised as little dragons in their stroller. .

But to be a true cosplayer is not only to wear a costume or to wear a mask, "you must also embody a character by imitating his gestures and his expressions, both physical and verbal," says Célia Villatte, aka Narancia Ghirga, hero from the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga.

"I like this male character, the design of his suit (brown wig, orange mini-skirt on black pants) but also his moving story and his burnt head temperament," she says.

A student in Clermont-Ferrand (center), the 19-year-old French girl explains that she made the trip to Tuscany to meet people "because people come to you more easily when you're cosplayed".

She also hopes to meet the creator of her favorite character, the Japanese designer Hirohiko Araki, considered one of the greatest masters "mangakas" and whose first participation in a convention outside Japan.

© 2019 AFP