San Diego Comic-Con
multi-genre entertainment and comic convention

San Diego Comic-Con is a comic book convention and multi-genre entertainment event held annually in San Diego, California, United States, at the San Diego Convention Center. Founded in 1970, originally showcasing primarily comic books and science fiction/fantasy media, Comic-Con has grown to include a large range of pop culture and entertainment elements across virtually all genres.
According to Forbes, Comic-Con is the "largest convention of its kind in the world". Since 2010, Comic-Con has filled the San Diego Convention Center to capacity with over 130,000 attendees. Comic-Con is home to the Eisner Awards, which recognizes creative achievement in American comic books, often referred to as the comic industry's equivalent to the Academy Awards.
San Diego Comic Convention, doing business as Comic-Con International, is the corporate name of the public-benefit nonprofit corporation behind Comic-Con.
History and organization
The convention was founded in 1970 by Shel Dorf, Richard Alf, Ken Krueger, Mike Towry, Ron Graf, Barry Alfonso, Bob Sourk, Scott Shaw, John Pound, Roger Freedman, David Clark, and Greg Bear. Initial comic book and sci-fi club meetings would be held at Krueger's Alert Books in Ocean Beach, where much of the foundation of the early Cons coalesced. In the mid-1960s, Dorf, a Detroit-born comics fan, organized the Detroit Triple Fan Fair, one of the first commercial comics-fan conventions in the United States. When he moved to San Diego in 1970, he organized a one-day convention known as San Diego's Golden State Comic-Minicon on March 21, 1970, "as a kind of 'dry run' for the larger convention he hoped to stage".
The public source identifies “San Diego Comic-Con” as multi-genre entertainment and comic convention. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Diego, Comic-Con and multi-genre.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q279385. Authority coordinates are 32.706, -117.161. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “San Diego Comic-Con” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.