Big Crowds, Some Glitches at NYCC 2007
 Avoiding the sophomore jinx, the second New York Comic-con roared through the Jacob Javits Center over the weekend, allowing an estimated 40,000 attendees to rub elbows with everyone from Stephen King to Jeff Smith and the ubiquitous Star Wars storm troopers. But it's clear the show is doing something right—show organizer Greg Topalian confirmed that Javits Center management will expand the size of the exhibition floor significantly for the 2008 show.
The big story of the con was whether last year's crowd control nightmares would be repeated, but a great deal of advance planning and caution on the part of organizer Reed Exhibitions, a sister company to Publishers Weekly, and security helped avoid major problems. Topalian estimated that Saturday's attendance alone was over 20,000, and the line to get in—for advance ticket holders only, since Saturday advance tickets had been sold out for weeks—stretched all the way down 11th Avenue and took a little more than two hours to file in to the show.
Once inside, fans were greeted by a panorama of all that "comic-con" has come to stand for, with signings, giveaways and panels galore. Comics publishers DC, Marvel, Top Cow, Oni and Slave Labor all had major talent and signings, while the book publishing world was on hand with Del Rey, HarperCollins, Roaring Brook/First Second, Warner Books and Houghton Mifflin among others. From U.K. boutique manga house Fanfare/Ponent Mon to studio/publisher hybrid Fox Atomic, there was something for everyone.
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Provocative ideas animate this story by revolutionary female manga artist Takemiya. After seeing how uncontrolled humanity wrecked Earth, survivors form the Superior Domination and decide to move to other planets and improve on nature: henceforth, all children will be computer-designed for rationality, then purged of all memories at puberty so they can be supervised by a "mother" machine. Sometimes, however, testing discovers that the child is a Mu, a hyperemotional and uncontrollable telepath, who are driven underground by the S.D. Having been raised as a normal boy, 14-year-old Jomy desperately resists contact by the Mu, especially the news that he is an exceptionally powerful latent
telepath who is destined to lead the Mu back to Terra. Meanwhile, cold-blooded Keith is rising in the ranks of the military forces designed to keep a rejuvenated Earth clean of Mu contamination. Takemiya's layouts are inventive, but her art is a bit fragile for space opera; in particular, her people look too wispy. Her story, though, is uncommonly compelling as it begins grappling with characters who, despite their one-sided upbringings, are looking for the same thing: Terra, family, a place to call home. With echoes of The Matrix and A.E. Van Vogt's Slan, this looks like the start of an interesting journey. (Feb.)
