On October 31, 2025, during Lucca Comics & Games, Europe’s most important festival dedicated to pop culture and the world’s second-largest by attendance, audiences witnessed an event that will mark the history of Italian animation. In the crowded Auditorium del Suffragio, a famous and historic theater in the city center, Sergio Bonelli Editore presented the world premiere of the first episode of the animated series Special Agent Legs Weaver an ambitious project chronicling the adventures of one of the publishing house’s most iconic characters. The event, hosted by Luca Del Savio and Virginia Benzi, revealed a refined and surprising product capable of blending the legacy of Italian comics with the most modern animation techniques.
The series, consisting of four ten-minute episodes and also available as a forty-minute feature-length format, represents a historic milestone for Bonelli Entertainment. After two seasons of Dragonero I Paladini, Bonelli moves away from children’s animation and presents a product designed specifically for a broader audience, using animation codes with a narrative awareness and maturity unique in its genre. As stated by Vincenzo Sarno, head of Bonelli Entertainment and the first of the major names present on stage to celebrate Legs: «This production represents an epochal step for Sergio Bonelli Editore and an unprecedented collaboration with RAI that allows us to bring our beloved character to new levels of adventure and animation.»
The choice of 2D animation is not random but represents a precise creative strategy. Bonelli Entertainment and Rai Kids wanted to create a bridge between Western and Eastern animation, targeting an audience of enthusiasts who have been following Japanese productions designed for audiences beyond just children for years. In Japan, animation applied to mature stories is a well-established tradition, while in Italy it remains almost unexplored territory.
«We needed to find a character that had in its DNA the ability to be exciting,» explained Vincenzo Sarno. «We needed a character that could look at the canon of 1980s Japanese animation with irony, that would evolve the concept of breaking the fourth wall expressed by John Byrne in the “She-Hulk” series.» The answer was Rebecca Lawrence Weaver, known as Legs, a heroine born in 1991 in the pages of Nathan Never, a character created by Medda, Serra & Vigna, who became the protagonist of her own series starting in 1995. «We asked ourselves: but who in Bonelli embodies all this?» Sarno recounted at Lucca. «The answer was a character who was Nathan’s sidekick in the early years and then became an absolute protagonist. She embodies the poetics of Nathan Never’s three creators, but also the grammar of one of the three. And that’s Antonio Serra.» Serra, described by Sarno as «a man of incredible intelligence who knew how to mix different canons, different grammars to give the Italian audience a character who was so ahead of her time that she was already in the future.»
To realize this ambitious project, Bonelli Entertainment turned to Tiwi, which had already collaborated with the publishing house on The Editor is in series. As recounted by Federico Rossi Edrighi, another author beloved by the Italian audience who wanted to be present on the Auditorium stage and one of the series’ two directors, «I don’t know if perhaps it was the most difficult thing, but certainly one of the most important was the transition, without betraying the character, from one medium to another.» The main challenge was maintaining Legs’ essence – her irony, her freshness, her dynamism – while adapting it to the language of animation. Raffaele Compagnoni, co-director and representative of Tiwi, added: «It’s an extremely fun process to review every scene 1500 times to optimize it, to ensure that the pace doesn’t drop, but also that the limits we set ourselves in terms of animation were respected.»
The series’ opening theme, which openly pays homage to “Cowboy Bebop,” demonstrates the intention to dialogue with masterpieces of Japanese animation, as Compagnoni himself admitted with self-deprecating humor: «As kids we all wanted to be Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop. We didn’t make it, but we made Legs.»
The series consists of four episodes directed by Federico Rossi Edrighi and Raffaele Compagnoni, with executive producer Vincenzo Sarno and production director Antonio Navarra. The environments were completely recreated from scratch, starting from the original materials of the Nathan Never comic series, created by Michele Medda, Antonio Serra and Bepi Vigna. The design work was entrusted among others to Luca Genovese and Fabiana Fiengo, who collaborated to adapt the characters to animation without betraying their spirit. As explained by Giovanni Masi and Mauro Uzzeo, the project’s creative producers, the work of translating from comic to animated series was not simple, because Legs in comics had an enormous pool to draw from, but the problem is that to bring them to animation, a completely different language, the right adaptation had to be found. Additionally, Legs’ narrative genre imposes precise rules that the team had to respect while maintaining the visual essence of the comic, a delicate balance achieved through months of trials and adjustments.
The series’ screenplay was entrusted to Adriano Barone, well known in the USA for his team-up with DC Comics, who worked on a story by Antonio Serra, one of the character’s three original creators. The story adapts a classic cycle from the Legs comic series, that of the Black Ladies, maintaining the comedy tone that has always characterized the special agent’s adventures. As Barone himself recounted at Lucca in front of the most important representatives of the sector gathered in the prestigious meeting location: «When Legs had her own title there was an addition of world building compared to what was Nathan Never’s world with a take that was decidedly comedy.»
The comedy side is not just a genre, but a way of storytelling that transforms the narrative. Legs breaks the fourth wall, dialogues with the viewer, even makes fun of other products from the same production company, such as Dragonero I Paladini. It’s the first time in a Rai product that a character allows herself this level of meta-narration, creating a double short-circuit that winks at longtime comic readers while remaining accessible to a new audience.
The production of Special Agent Legs Weaver lasted more than a year and involved over 100 professionals in both artistic and technical capacities. Antonio Navarra, production director, coordinated a team that included the staff of Tiwi and Bonelli Entertainment. During the Lucca meeting, Navarra emphasized the importance of the research and development phase: «In a production like this, where you’re trying to optimize, ideas are always welcome and obviously research and development is the basis of any production, even an animated series.»
Vincenzo Sarno, head of Bonelli Entertainment, did not hide his enthusiasm for this project. The series in fact represents a fundamental step in the path that leads Bonelli to be among the first entities in Italy in the field of animation in every aspect, not just children’s animation as with Dragonero I Paladini.
Roberto Genovesi, director of Rai Kids, on the occasion of the live meeting at Lucca Comics & Games, confirmed that the series will be available in 2026 on RAI channels. Genovesi, who boasts a long association with Bonelli characters, emphasized the importance of Italian comics for animation: «I believe there is still too little Italian comics in children’s TV, both in terms of properties and ideas. Authors, screenwriters, comic book writers have an ability to construct narrative timing that can be very useful today for new Italian cartoons,» explained Genovesi. With Legs Weaver and Dragonero I Paladini, the journey between Rai Kids and Bonelli is just beginning.
Special Agent Legs Weaver represents a unique entry in the Italian animated production landscape. It is the first animated series explicitly designed for an adult audience, produced by Bonelli Entertainment in collaboration with Rai. Legs, born in 1991 and who became in 1995 the first female heroine to headline a series in the Bonelli universe, now arrives in a format that enhances her most distinctive characteristics: sharp irony, overwhelming action, the ability to not take herself too seriously while telling compelling stories. The project opens the way to a new season of Italian animation, demonstrating that it is possible to create sophisticated products for adults by leveraging creativity, deep knowledge of characters, and collaboration between excellent production companies. As Antonio Serra stated: «The fact that today Legs becomes an animated series is an important event not only for the publishing house, but also for us who created Legs. We hope you enjoy watching the series exactly as we enjoyed imagining it.»
Welcomed with applause in the unique setting of Lucca’s Auditorium del Suffragio, Legs Weaver is about to land on Italian screens, and Italian animation will never be the same.
Storyboards
Character design
Frames from the first episode
Backstage
