Marvel Comics, together with DC Comics, have been for many decades the two main comic book publishing companies in the world. Marvel Comics first became popular during the Golden Age of comics.Some of the characters created in this period, such as Spider-Man, Captain America, X-Men and Fantastic Four became worldwide and have become cultural icons of the western society of the last forty years.
We looked at the Marvel Universe collaboration network,where two Marvel characters are considered linked if they jointly appear in the same Marvel comic book. This network is created artificially by Marvel’s writers especially by Stan Lee. However, this network mimics real-life networks. A hero with its’ own title series appearing in an issue of another hero’s series were common in the Golden Age period. Characters lived their adventures in the same fictional cosmos, and they interacted each other like real actors.Same villains and secondary characters would appear in comic books of different issues and there were continuous references to the events that were simultaneously happening, or had happened.
Most pairs of characters that have jointly appeared in the same comic book have fought shoulder to shoulder or each other, or have had some other strong relationship, like family ties, kidnapping and archenemies. Thus, this network has the same nature of a real scientific collaboration network.
We have investigated communities in the Marvel Universe collaboration network. It was interesting to compare our results with the knowledge we have about the Marvel Universe. We have found many Marvel characters that were overlapping in many communities because of the crossover of the Marvel characters in the comic books.
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