Marvel Comic Book Artist Collaboration Networks

01 Oct 2014

Notice: All Marvel comic book cover images are from the public Marvel API and are copyright of Marvel Worldwide Inc. All graph visualizations are original works.

Intro

The idea here is really pretty simple. Using the Marvel Developer API, step through a comic book series and build a network showing which artists, letterers, writers, etc. worked together on issues in that series. So, for a given comic book, if there were 5 people listed in the credits for that issue then they would be placed on the graph fully connected to each other. Then move on to the next issue in the series and do the same. The resulting graph shows the collaboration that occurred over the span of that comic book series. Note that these series aren't all-encompassing of every comic book written about a character or team. Marvel often runs many different series about its characters and teams.

Gephi Streaming

To take this to the next level, I didn't just want to see the final graphs, I wanted to watch the graphs grow as I walked the comic book series chronologically. For this I used the Gephi Streaming API. I ended up writing a Java client that's on github. Doing this allows me to watch the collaboration graph grow as artists and their interactions are added for each issue.