For a new legion of aficionados, the annual San Diego convention known as Comic-Con has become much more than a place to geek out over comic books. It provides a venue to get dressed up and engage in some cosplay (costume role-playing elevated to performance art), offers celebrities fertile ground for hawking their latest film or publicity project, and has even been the staging ground for more than a few reality TV shows.

The growing prominence of comic-book culture is at the center of a new exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, "Sunshine and Superheroes: San Diego Comic-Con." Curated by Suzanne Fischer (OMCA's associate curator of contemporary history) and Sarah Elkind (a San Diego State University history professor), the show is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Oakland Museum and statewide CSU campuses.

Elkind says that the exhibition will provide visitors with "a sense of the Comic-Con experience as it explains American popular culture, ideas about gender and the politics of tourism in many California cities."

Elkind's history students were responsible for choosing the topic, identifying objects that would be placed in the show and guiding exhibition design. The initial discussions led students to explore the ebb and flow of popular fascination with comic books, action figures, fantasy films and products associated with Comic-Con, and enabled them to research the politics of public investment in San Diego's convention center and other large-scale tourism facilities in American cities.

For Fischer, this is a show that is about fantasies, "personal and cultural fantasies of being a superhero, civic fantasies of the power of a tourist economy."

Comic-Con's growing influence reflects issues much larger than the mainstreaming of geek culture. It's also demonstrative of how San Diego sees itself; for instance, during the event, the city replaces trolley signs with signs in Klingon and other invented languages.

Additionally, the show explores the way Comic-Con and comics represent gender, using costumes made by two cosplayers, says Fischer: "an elaborate badass Batwoman costume and a more sexualized costume" for supervillain Harley Quinn. The costumes highlight the exaggeration of female types, while action figures from the 1980s and 2010s reveal similar themes in the depiction of maleness.

Elkind says that the popular culture that is the stuff of Comic-Con shapes national perceptions of heroism and patriotism. "This is most clearly illustrated in the evolution of Captain America's transformation from a stalwart opponent of fascism in World War II and a fighter of Communists in the Cold War, to a cynical renegade battling the federal government itself in the last decade."

A series of vintage comic books, Comic-Con paraphernalia, student-produced videos and an interactive photo booth with an array of costumes are among some of the offerings in the exhibition.

If you go

Sunshine and Superheroes: Opens Friday. Through May 31, 2015. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, until 9 p.m. Friday. $6-$15. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland. (510) 318-8400.
