I walked to New York Comic Con along the High Line, a Manhattan rail-track-turned-greenway lined by the kind of futuristic architecture only the truly wealthy can afford. Perhaps the most famous of these is the building at 520 West 28th Street, a fluid, curvilinear glass-and-steel structure designed by Zaha Hadid, in her hallmark parametric style — which is to say, with the help of a computer capable of turning complicated equations into extremely expensive apartments.

In a certain light, the buildings towering over the High Line look like AI renderings of imagined futures, rather than already existing structures occupied by the überrich denizens of Chelsea. Is the future infiltrating the present, or is the present tumbling ever faster into the future?

If I had an answer to that question, I had forgotten it by the time I was standing in the costumed commotion of Comic Con, a veritable Babel of pop cultural references. This year the gathering drew more than two hundred thousand people to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.