Dramacon is about an indy comic/manga creator named Christie attending an anime convention. Last years convention she met a guy, Matt, whom she fell in love with and broke up with her then boyfriend/artist. This year Christie has a new artist and Matt arrives at the convention.... with his new girlfriend. Christie and Matt deal with each others feelings about this. Along the way the book covers table neighbours, fans, big name pros and editors cherry picking people to offer work to. Lots of stuff to keep the book moving in an entertaining way. The story is excellent, a lot of the characters, situations, reactions and personalities just ring true. The pacing of the story and the dialogue are great. Because the first book was so great (I gave it a 4 out of 5 stars) it's hard to review this without comparing it to the previous volume. This book has a denser plot, much more happening in it. Which makes it just as good, if not better than the first one. I also liked that the ending wasn't quite what I expected, but made sense. Only slight draw back from the denser story is I didn't reread this book as often, but even flipping through it now for the purpose of this review it's drawing me in big time. I'm still amazed that somebody this new at doing comics can be this damn good. Svetlana uses a wide variety of storytelling techniques to get her message through. In particular I noticed attention was paid towards the characters body language. Some of it was quite fun too, I liked little things like the way Christie gives a relaxed slouch with a Veteran arrow is pointed at her. Svet also shows greater range in the cartooney methods of showing her characters emotions. The panel flow is great. Not any standard grid, but easy to follow along. A real mix of open panels, boxed in ones and odd shapes that are used to draw the eye around. The characters are drawn with the intention of keeping your eye moving, there are details, but not so much that you stop to admire them all. Art is in service to the story here, not the other way around. I give the book a 5 out of 5 stars. Now there is one thing I must write about at length because it's been on my mind since first reading it. Within the book there is a fan who causes a big stink because in his view, only Japan comics are manga. At one point he says "You're not Japanese!! So you can't draw manga!" Then pointing an black artist he says "She's not Japanese either!! She's not even white!!" In reading this I can already imagine the stink it would cause among those fans that really, honestly do believe that only manga can be done by Japanese and *hate* that people outside the country of Japan are creating original works in that style. They probably didn't like being associated with racists either. At first I wondered why Svet did this. Then it dawned on me. What if somebody from Canada/America were to tell an non-American creator that their work is not "comics" and is automatically crap, not worth reading, acknowledging or anything simply based on the ethnicity of the artist that created it? To say something like "Well, your black and from Nigeria and therefor your work is no good." We'd call that "fan" a bigot at the very least. This is exactly the treatment many OEL/World Manga creators got when their books were first published. I don't know the sales numbers of those books but I understand a lot of them aren't selling as well as TokyoPop hoped they would. It must be frustrating to put about a years worth of time, doing your best possible work into a book only to have it ignored, hated and dismissed by what appears to be the masses based purely on your ethnic origin. One thing I want to make clear, I don't think Svet is suggesting she's been discriminated against because she's not Japanese. Dramacon is the one book that *has* broken the 'not from Japan' barrier and achieved both very high sales and critical acclaim. Again I don't know the details of it's sales numbers but I'm under the impression that it's outselling the majority of translated manga, with the exception of the really big series. When this volume made it's debut, it ranked #8 on the Bookscan sales charts, which is incredible. To give you superhero fans a point of reference, the Infinite Crisis TPB was #9 on the same chart. This bodes well for the comics market if we can convert some of those 'manga purists' over to original works. I'm looking forward to Dramacon Vol. 3 and whatever else Svetlana does, she's quite talented as both a writer and an artist and I suspect we're going to get more great books from her.

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