ON any other day, the sight of six young people walking in solemn single file in public, all of them calmly wearing a brightly-coloured TV monitor over their heads, might have caused a flurry of comment.

Not this weekend, though. Not when the MCM Scotland Comic Con is in town. Yesterday, the TV wearers were, if not exactly low-profile, then just another part of the endless parade of fantasy costumes at the SECC.

MCM Comic Con claims to stage the UK's biggest modern pop culture events and even after just a couple of hours you began to think it might have a point. Sci-fi, films, animé, games, cosplay and comics were here in a teeming abundance. The age-range of the fans was considerable, too, from very young children to grannies in wheelchairs.

While many of the fans were content to wear T-shirts - Batman, Breaking Bad, Star Wars - others had really made an effort with elaborate costumes, some of which had been painstakingly made at home. Characters from manga and animé were here in their hundreds, while the grip of big-budget superhero movies on the popular imagination was also evident.

It was impossible to walk a few feet without encountering a Star Wars stormtrooper, a Jedi knight, a Spiderman, a Captain America, a Batman. There were clusters of blokes in yellow Breaking Bad biohazard suits. One man came dressed as Jules, the hitman from Pulp Fiction. Young women in yellow tracksuits channelled Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. One video game was represented by a bunch of men with clown masks and machine-guns.

One man was dressed in a suit studded with the Batman motif. There were Jokers, and Riddlers, and characters from Kick-Ass. One reed-thin man in his early 20s in a smart pin-stripe suit may or may not have come as Colin Firth's character in Kingsman: The Secret Service. There were men dressed as women. One man had a baby doll in a harness strapped to his chest. Several people walked around with signs offering free hugs.

You had to be pretty knowledgeable to identify the manga and animé characters, though it has to be said that these costumes, teamed with wigs of every colour under the sun, were the ones that caught the eye. In more ways than one: in the throng, a young woman in a flowing satiny dress nearly took the Sunday Herald's eye out with the sharp point of one of her wings.

The stands did good business: comics, figurines, DVDs, Lego kits, T-shirts, board games. Stove-pipe hats were on sale for £36 (all sizes). You could have your name engraved on a bullet in just 60 seconds. Even the man who was staffing the Dogs Trust stall seemed happy with the level of interest from passers-by.

The VIP names who posed for photos and (at £15 a time) signed autographs included Sophie Aldred from Doctor Who, Robert Picardo from Star Trek: Voyager, and Game of Thrones stars Ian Beattie and Ian McElhinney.

In such a large and bustling crowd, it was no surprise that more than a few parents should temporarily mislay their children.

The 2015 Glasgow Comic Con, which continues today, could end up attracting around 35,000 people; the London one, at Excel on October 23-25, however, is even bigger. Last year it drew 122,000.

Asked about the prevalence of Japanese-inspired characters, Bryan Cooney, the event promoter, said: "Girls enter the sci-fi and fantasy world through reading, mainly, and Japanese manga comic-books is very appealing to them, for the art and the stories.

"You've got the proliferation of things like Harry Potter, Twilight, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games and Maze Runner. People are reading those books before they become films. Girls love reading more than boys, and it's causing them to become involved more in the whole scene.

"Social media is personal and not personal, especially on Facebook, and they don't get to meet each other. They keep in touch with their friends from all over the UK and in some cases abroad, but events like this are where they can say, 'I'm with my people'. This is where they meet their friends."

Comic books were bringing young boys back into reading, he added. They might get hooked on movies such as Captain America or The Avengers but might have to wait two years for a sequel to appear. "They're filling the gap by reading, say, a new Captain America: Winter Soldier, or Thor, comic-book. So they start to read, and they follow it through."