Comic-Con Museum® Announces Exclusive New Exhibits at WonderCon ®
Betty Boop, Afrofuturism, Tijuana Comic Artist Featured in Three Exhibits
Premiering at San Diego Museum in May, June
SAN DIEGO (March 29, 2024) – Today at its WonderCon panel, Comic-Con Museum announced three upcoming exhibits featuring the famous Betty Boop, award-winning comic creator and Afrofuturist John Jennings, and a bi-national exhibition as a participating World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024 community initiative.
Scheduled to open to the public in May and June 2024, these exhibits are all world premieres and original to the Museum. Exhibits include:
“Becoming Betty Boop”
Opening late June 2024
Comic-Con Museum and Fleischer Studios present “Becoming Betty Boop,” an exclusive exhibit showcasing the history and evolution of the iconic cartoon character. Introduced to the world in the early 1930s, Betty Boop was the first and only female animated screen star in the world at the time. The exhibit will be a delightful mixture of never-before-seen artifacts, artwork, animated films, and a bespoke collaborative art piece created just for the exhibit.
“Border Blitz: Artistas del Cómic de Tijuana”
Opening May 9, 2024
In celebration of World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024, Comic-Con Museum and the Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego announce their second binational collaboration: “Border Blitz: Artistas del Cómic de Tijuana.” Featuring the art of Charles Glaubitz, Alejandra Yépiz Portillo, and Urbano Mata, the exhibit will highlight the diverse stories and perspectives of these border artists as told through their art. Signage and descriptions will be in English and Spanish. The Comic Con Museum is proud to present this exhibition as an official initiative within the World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024 Community Program. The World Design Capital distinction is awarded biennially by the World Design Organization to cities leveraging design for economic, social, cultural, and environmental advancement. Marking a first in WDO history, the joint recognition of San Diego and Tijuana as a region pioneers new ground, casting a global spotlight on our region.
“Collaboration(s)! A Journey with John Jennings”
Opening May 9, 2024
The exhibit explores the many graphic novel and comic art collaborations in the world of John Jennings. Jennings is an Eisner Award–winning and New York Times best-selling comic artist and author, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, and the director of the Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award –winning collection “The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art.” Along with Damian Duffy, Jennings adapted “Kindred” by Octavia Butler into a graphic novel, an Eisner award-winner in 2018.
“Celebrating comics and the popular arts allows us to celebrate trailblazers of the past, like Betty Boop, and look to the fantastical worlds of the future, such as the Afrofuturism in John Jennings’s work and modern mythology in Charles Glaubitz’s work,” said Museum Executive Director Rita Vandergaw. “Our walls and galleries will display various languages, cultures, and decades that will resonate with a variety of fans – the popular arts are for everyone.”
On display now, Comic-Con Museum’s headlining exhibit is “POPnology,” an interactive, engaging exhibit that demonstrates the connection between pop culture and real-world technology. Visitors can engage with their favorite science fiction technology, such as driverless cars, robots, drones, and more, to learn how fantasy becomes reality and explore which science fiction of today will become reality tomorrow.
Additionally, on display for one more month, guests can visit “Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman,” an exhibition of original art by the award-winning artist Colleen Doran for her illustrations of stories by Neil Gaiman, including Chivalry, Snow, Glass, Apples, The Sandman, Troll Bridge, American Gods, Norse Mythology, and Good Omens. Twenty lush hand-painted pages from Doran’s Chivalry (Dark Horse Books) are the centerpiece of the exhibit, telling the story of Mrs. Whitaker, a British widow who finds the Holy Grail in a thrift shop, and the knight who offers her priceless relics in exchange so he can win the Grail and end his quest. The exhibition is curated by Kim A. Munson (Comic Art in Museums).
Comic-Con Museum is open every day except Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the last entry at 4 p.m. Admission (adults ages 18+) is $25; children (ages 6–12) are $12; seniors (65+), students (13–17), and military are $18. Children five years of age and below are free. Tickets can be purchased in advance at comic-con.org/museum or at the door.
About Comic-Con Museum
Comic-Con Museum is a division of San Diego Comic Convention (SDCC) a California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation organized for charitable purposes and dedicated to creating the general public’s awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular art forms, including participation in and support of public presentations, conventions, exhibits, museums, and other public outreach activities which celebrate the historic and ongoing contribution of comics to art and culture. In addition to its San Diego convention each summer, Comic-Con (the premier comics convention of its kind in the world), SDCC organizes the Anaheim-based WonderCon each spring and the SAM: Storytelling Across Media symposium in the fall. On the web: comic-conmuseum.org, Facebook.com/ComicConMuseum, and follow us on X (@ComicConMuseum) and Instagram (@comicconmuseum).
