The long-anticipated Comic-Con Museum has opened to the public in a soft launch, with a full launch due later in the year. Located at Balboa Park, San Diego, and featuring six exhibits and special programming and screenings, the museum celebrates ‘the magic of Comic-Con year-round.’
Night-time activities will be held leading up to the official grand opening in the summer of 2022.
At approximately 68,000 square feet, the museum will be able to host up to 650 attendees at any given time. It is projected to garner roughly $3 million in revenue its first year, showcasing unique exhibitions of comics, science fiction, movies, cosplay, video games, and other popular arts.
The Comic-Con Museum project is spearheaded by The San Diego Comic Convention, the purveyors of Comic-Con International: San Diego.
$26million in funding for the Comic-Con Museum project was raised through grants, donors, sponsorships and the San Diego Comic Convention. The Museum was originally set to open in 2020, but the global COVID-19 pandemic delayed the efforts.
The museum comprises three floors and will be renovated and expanded over the next years. Activations will include panels, creator meet-and-greets, experiential cinema, watch parties, eSports, cosplay shows, concerts, interactive experiences, classrooms, and exhibits.
Rita Vandergaw and Comic-Con Museum
According to Rita Vandergaw, executive director at Comic-Con Museum, this role is her third career.
“I started out in radio when I was just a teenager,” she told blooloop. “I put myself through college by working for a radio station in Dallas and then went to put together proposals for an ad agency representing both TV and radio stations. Then I headed up the advertising department for Frontier Airlines. After this, I was VP of marketing for Frontier before they went out of business.”
She went to Continental Airlines, where she ran the advertising program for their Continental Express, the jet service to ski and summer resorts.
“Then I moved to San Diego to work as senior director of marketing and communications for the Port of San Diego, responsible for bringing in their cruise business.”
In 2014 she retired and served in a volunteer capacity on the Comic-Con board.
“I volunteered to help them get started. Tourism is my background and my love. The Comic-Con Museum is located in the incredible Balboa Park. This has eighteen museums and many cultural houses in over 1400 acres of Parkland.”
Soft opening
Comic-Con needed someone to help them get the new museum open, manage a construction project, and get the exhibits online.
“I started in July of last year, we started a one and a half million dollar construction project on August 9th, and we had a soft opening on November 26th,” she says:
“Believe me, it was probably the hardest job I’ve ever had. I can’t believe, looking back, that we did it, but, thanks to the Comic-Con team, we did. It certainly wasn’t done by me by myself, but I did lead the effort.”
“All the different jobs, special events and different areas of responsibility I’ve had in the past, including overseeing and building up two cruise terminals in San Diego, helped me expedite this and get it done.
“I looked at getting the exhibits set up like a special event: we had to get this done – and that’s what we did. I’m proud of where we are. And we’re planning our grand opening for July of this year.”
The idea for a Comic-Con Museum
Taking a step back, Vandergaw describes how the Comic-Con Museum came about:
“Comic-Con is, of course, the largest pop culture convention of its kind. It has been around since 1970 and is very successful. Around six years ago, they identified that they wanted to do something.
“Comic-Con has grown to the point where if you haven’t been to Comic-Con and aren’t on their list, it can be had to get in. It’s a four-day event, and it sells out in a matter of minutes. There is also WonderCon in Anaheim in California. So, there are eight days out of the year that you can go to a Comic-Con event. The idea was to do something to bring ComicCon to people every day.”
The opportunity arose to take over a site in Balboa Park. This had previously been a Championship Hall of Fame Sports Museum:
“It hadn’t done that well,” she explains. “It’s a 60,000 plus square foot building. They brought it to Comic-Con, and said, ‘Would you consider opening a museum?’”
Sharing the magic of comic books
Comic-Con is, she comments, an entrepreneurial organisation:
“They are very much dedicated to education, and to informing people about the magic of comic books. Illustrative art has been with us for centuries, and the things that it has done have been amazing. So they decided to look at it. They did a feasibility analysis, they did a lot of work, and they hired a professional museum operator, who came on board to get everything ready in 2017.”
Work continued through 2018 and 2019, and into 2020:
“And then, of course, we had the pandemic. It had a devastating effect on not only the museum but also Comic-Con because their events are in-person. They have had almost two and a half years without any income.”
The organisation relied on its reserves to stay afloat:
“What I really admire about them is, [having] made this commitment they were going to open the museum in 2020, which couldn’t happen, they went ahead and invested in a million-and-a-half-dollar construction project to open it in November 2021, the earliest possible opportunity.”
This was, she points out, a risk:
“We’re still in pandemic mode. We are getting people to come, but it’s not what it would be under normal conditions.”
Grand opening ahead
However, she is excited about the grand opening in July 2022:
“We have secured an event for July of 2022 for our grand opening. I can’t share that yet, but we’ll be making an announcement, probably in April, about what that will be. It will be terrific: very much aligned with Comic-Con’s mission of bringing you pop culture, and also educational opportunities.”
There will be an education centre aligned with the museum. She says:
“We have opened the first 3000 square feet of it. Then we have another 3000 square feet that we still need to construct. It will operate year-round and will be tied to the curriculum for schools and students.”
“We will have STEAM classes, art and sculpting classes, and high-end computer technology classes. These will be not only for school children and young adults, but also for adults. We’re just starting that program. I am in the process of hiring an education director right now.
“We will launch our first quarter of school-age programming in September. Then we’ll have some adult programming starting in May or June. It’s very exciting, and San Diego is such a great tourism destination.”
Arts & culture draw audiences
Interestingly, she adds:
“The arts and culture part of tourism is its fastest-growing segment. People tend to stay longer and spend more money when visiting a city when they are looking at arts and culture. New York and London are perfect examples of that.”
The arts and culture part of tourism is its fastest-growing segment. People tend to stay longer and spend more money when visiting a city when they are looking at arts and culture.
San Diego may not have the reputation of being a cultural centre, but in fact, she says, it is:
“We’ve got La Jolla Playhouse, where many Broadway plays are get started.”
Then there are the Balboa, Spreckles, Lyceum and Mandell Weiss theatres:
“Now we’ll have the iconic Comic-Con Museum, which will not exist anywhere else. It is completely unique, and we are positioning it as such. There will be one-of-a-kind exhibits that will not be found anywhere else.”
Exhibits at Comic-Con Museum
The six exhibits available at Comic-Con Museum cover a wide range of popular arts.
This includes Gene Roddenberry: Sci-Fi Visionary, an exhibit highlighting the career and legacy of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek; Chas Addams… Family and Friends, an exhibit on the creator of The Addams Family television series, and multiple films; and Eight Decades of Archie, an exhibition that celebrates the legacy of Archie Comics.
There is also the Pac-Man Arcade, a nostalgic showcase of the recognizable brand, and Cardboard Superheroes, through which pop-culture characters come to life as cardboard figures.
In addition, Out of the Darkness: Comic Art in the Times of COVID is a collaborative exhibit between Comic-Con Museum and A Reason to Survive (ARTS), a creative youth development nonprofit serving young people across South San Diego County, that explores the experiences of the past 18 months.
Chas Addams… Family and Friends and Out of the Darkness: Comic Art in the Times of COVID will run until February 28, 2022.
Celebrating Gene Roddenberry
Vandergraw talks about appeal of the Gene Roddenberry exhibit. This celebrates the achievements of a writer whose creations have enchanted generations of fans:
“If you are a Star Trek fan, you’re absolutely going to adore this exhibit. You enter through a portal, a tunnel, and then there’s a timeline that you follow on the floor, which marks out the life of Gene Roddenberry, telling you what happened from the day he was born up until the day that he died, and then past that because this is celebrating 100 years.”
Roddenberry would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2021.
“The timeline takes you through all the iterations of Gene’s life,” Vandergaw continues. “Like all of us that have lived over 70 years, he did a lot of things in his lifetime. Actually, he didn’t become a science fiction writer until he was in his 40s.”
Exploring Roddenberry’s legacy at Comic-Con Museum
Roddenberry was born in 1921 and flew 89 combat missions in the Army Air Forces during World War II. He then worked as a commercial pilot after the war, before emulating his father and joining the Los Angeles Police Department. This is when he began to write scripts for television.
As a freelance, he wrote scripts for series such as Highway Patrol and Have Gun – Will Travel, as well as producing his own television series, The Lieutenant. It was in 1964 that he created Star Trek:
“The title of the exhibit is Sounds of Positivity. That’s what Roddenberry was really all about, the positive things,” she explains. “His other thing was diversity.”
According to George Takei:
“Roddenberry felt that the Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth and the strength of this starship lay in its diversity.” (From the BT Archive)
“We’ll be refreshing the exhibit and adding some new items to it, which will be available beginning in March, and will be with us through June,” she says.
The mission
Explaining the museum’s mission, Vandergaw says:
“It is to continue the magic of Comic-Con; to bring a little bit of Comic-Con to those people that can’t attend, and to give you a little bit of that experience.”
The second world-premiere exhibition the museum is currently showing is Eight Decades of Archie. This celebrates both the vast cultural legacy of Archie Comics over its 80-year span and the enduring appeal of its ever-evolving cast of typical American teenagers.
The exhibit explores Riverdale through vintage comic books, original art, unique props and exclusive memorabilia, charting Archie Andrews’s evolution from his inception in 1941 through the subsequent decades.
“We have original art from the creators,” Vandergaw says. “There is original art representing every Archie artist that created panels for the comic book.”
Museum recreates Comic-Con atmosphere
The museum contrives, to a degree, to reproduce the atmosphere of Comic-Con:
“The pandemic has made it a challenge, of course, in terms of getting people out, and getting them to do things. But this past week we started our programming, which is really the key to any museum. It’s the exhibit that gets you in the door and then makes you want to stay, to spend more time.”
“We did a promotion with Apple and Jim Henson. They have a TV series, Fraggle Rock, which is back on the air. We had three showings of Fraggle Rock episodes, the new version, on Saturday and Sunday, free with a museum ticket.”
Comic-Con Museum’s small theatre seats 150 people:
“We are able to show films and to have panel discussions,” she explains. “We have three panel discussions scheduled about the impact of Rodenberry, looking at the things that he talked about in the science fiction world that have become reality.”
San Diego’s General Dynamics will take part and General Atomics will discuss the concept of warp speed. Meanwhile, Microsoft will expand on AR technology.
Looking ahead
In terms of planning for the future, Vandergaw comments:
“We are working on exhibit planning for 2023, 2024 and 2025. We’re talking with exhibitors all over the world to see what we could bring in that fits into the pop culture model, and works with Comic-Con.
“The senior director of programming for Comic-Con is has a lot of involvement in helping us with the exhibit planning. He has wonderful contacts. He knows the people at Disney, Marvel, DC, so we’ve been able to find a lot of content.”
“Now, it’s just a matter of refining it. For me, the strategy is about bringing the magic of Comic-Con every day, and establishing how we can do that through the exhibits, through education, through programming.
“It may not be completely immersive, but it needs to be interactive. We have a Pacman arcade, we have maker workshops. We are working on the digital space for an international audience. I haven’t got that fleshed out yet, but we definitely see the need.”
In conclusion, she adds:
“The vision is to stay true to what Comic-Con has started, to extend it, and to make it accessible for everybody through the museum.”
