MU Statistical Paper

I'm now remembering how interesting the article is. The writers are both experts in their specific fields of statistics, but also in Marvel lore too. Some of this reads almost comically at times. For instance, here is an explanation of both what the "Marvel Universe" is and an explanation of its interconnectedness. This basically reads like a soap opera.

One of the main features of Marvel Comics from the sixties to our days has been the creation and development, under the leading pen of Stan Lee, of the so-called Marvel Universe. Although crossovers (a hero with its own title series appears in an issue of another hero’s series) were not uncommon in the Golden Age period, the nature and span of the crossovers in the books from the Marvel Age led to the perception that all Marvel characters lived their adventures in the same fictional cosmos, called the Marvel Universe, where they interacted like real actors. This concept was helped by the interrelation of all titles that were being created, which made characters and even plots cross over on a regular basis, by the appearance of the same villains and secondary characters in comic books of different titles, and by continuous references to events that were simultaneously happening, or had happened, in other books. A paradigm of the Marvel Universe could be Quicksilver, who appeared first as a member of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the early issues of Uncanny X-Men, then he became a member of the Avengers and later of X-Factor, to end as the leader of the Knights of Wundagore; he is also the son of Magneto, the twin brother of the Scarlet Witch, and he married Crystal, a former fiancee of Fantastic Four’s Human Torch and a member of the Inhumans (as well as of the Fantastic Four as a substitute of the Invisible Woman when she took her “maternal leave”).

The actual description of the data is also really interesting. Here they just describe some of how the books and characters have been distributed around the Marvel Universe. It's kind of interesting, in and of itself, that the network is contained by books - that the books define, in other words, the relationships.

The bipartite graph summarizing the MCP database contains 6 486 nodes corresponding to characters and 12 942 nodes corresponding to comic books, and 96 662 edges going from the characters to the books where they appear.

A Marvel character appears typically in about 14.9 comic books. The number of appearances spans from 1 to 1 625: this greatest value corresponds to Spider-Man. The average number of characters per comic book is 7.47 with a range spanning from 1 to 111: this last value is achieved by Issue 1 of Contest of Champions (1982), where the Grandmaster and the Unknown took every superhero in the planet and selected two teams to battle it out.

Finally, here is a brief description of the discovered abnormality of the Marvel Universe's collaboration network. It's not just Spiderman, but also Captain America, that causes this.

It is shown [16, §V.A] that in the Hollywood graph and in several scientific collaboration networks the actual average degree is consistently smaller than the theoretical average degree of the corresponding random model, but not by such a large factor as the one found here. This indicates that Marvel characters are made to collaborate repeatedly with the same characters, which reduces their total number of co-partners well below the expected number in the random model, and that they collaborate quite more often with the same people than real movie actors or scientists do. This probably should be a hint of the artificiality of the Marvel Universe.