When the author was standing outside the Metro Toronto Convention Center, a passerby walked up, saw the lighted sign advertising "The Canadian National Science Fiction Convention," and asked, "There going to be a lot of Klingons in there?" No, there weren't a lot (only two that we saw). The CN Anime/Comic SFX was mostly a dealers' room with a couple of panel discussions. Nearly all of the event's space was given over to the dealers, who were in a big second-floor concourse. And it was clear that most of the attendees were interested only in the dealers' room.

That dealers' room demand led to the second-longest lines seen by the author at a convention (only Anime Expo's Friday lines were longer). The organizers sold three groups of tickets - to anime, comic and sci-fi fans - and ticket buyers had to get into a line for their group. Then, each line was allowed to walk to the escalator leading to the dealers' room, where their tickets were punched and they were let upstairs. On the way down their hands were stamped. On Saturday, each of the lines to the dealers' room seemed to be several hundred feet long. Those lines started moving at 10 a.m., and the backlog wasn't cleared until 11:30 a.m.

There were a couple of video rooms that showed anime. There was an anime game show patterned on You Don't Know Jack. No dance, no karaoke, no video game room (the only games spotted were in a Sony PlayStation booth, where only three of the four consoles worked). Only three panels of interest to the author.

This event had an early ending time on Saturday. While Otakon, also held in a convention center, ran until the wee hours of Sunday morning, the CN convention closed at 7 p.m. That accounted for the early time of the masquerade, which started at an unusual 5 p.m. on Saturday.

At first, it looked as if there might not be much to that masquerade. At midday on Saturday only 10 people had registered to appear in the show. That increased to 30 or so by the time of the contest (although a couple of acts failed to show). There were some interesting costumes, including three Borg from Star Trek, but hall costumers were rare. There was an anime fan among the judges, so they couldn't have been too prejudiced in favor of sci-fi costumes at the masquerade.

This event was a throwback to the days when there were no anime conventions, and anime fans had to settle for the odd corner at sci-fi events. The CN Anime organizers went to the trouble of inviting some fascinating people who are among the author's favorites (Rachael Lillis, Lisa Ortiz, Mari Iijima and Apollo Smile), and there was a popular appearance by voice actors from the Sailor Moon series (which has been more popular in Canada than in the U.S.). However, CN Anime wasn't close to being as good for hard-core anime fans as the major anime-only conventions from the last two years.

The big fuss before the convention was the withdrawal of Ray Park, the martial artist who played Darth Maul in the Star Wars - Phantom Menace movie. Convention organizers complained that they had a contract with Park, said Park's agent didn't want him to appear at the convention, and took their campaign to the Toronto Star. A big photocopy of the newspaper story was prominently posted in the convention hall.

In fairness, it should be noted that actor John DeLancie also did not show up for the convention. Neither did anime voice actor Crispin Freeman (he's working on a project in New York, we were told).

These notes are being written in the Lester Pearson airport in Toronto, listening to an airline trying to get passengers to volunteer not to get on an overbooked flight. At least they're not flying on US Airways, which messed up the author's travel plans again (how often is a flight canceled because a flight attendant didn't show up for work?)