Comeback comics

With industry revival at hand, thanks to Hollywood and loyal fans, comic-book makers have yet to defeat their own evil villains | Gene Edward Veith, Lynn Vincent

Roofed in white sails and draped with arcs of gleaming glass, San Diego's Convention Center perches coolly on the edge of a bright blue harbor. This month the venue throbbed with impossibly busty vixens shoehorned into spike heels and latex, a blow-up Pikachu Pokemon the size of a tour bus, superheroes with blue faces and hair like flames, a sour-faced little guy named "Bob the Angry Flower," and a disconcerting number of 40-year-old men wearing capes and tights.

This is no get-a-life fan convention but a dead-serious business exhibition: Comic-Con International 2005. Almost 100,000 people attended—nearly as many as attended this year's world-record-setting Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and three times the attendees at the MacWorld conference. Underscoring the indications that comics are on a comeback, many of the non-costumed Comic-Con attendees were Hollywood players scouting for new comic-book characters and looking to make deals.