Marvel-Universe-Assemble-.-.-.-in-a-Graph-Database

The Marvel Universe network (MU) is defined as the network whose nodes are significant Marvel characters and where two characters are linked when they jointly appear in a significant way in the same comic book. Here, It is only considered comics published after Issue 1 of Fantastic Four (dated November 1961), which is understood as the point of departure of the Marvel Age of Comics. Any study like this one must be based on a database, which puts the main restriction to its scope. In this case, the database we have used is the Marvel Chronology Project (MCP), which, according to its creator, R. Chappell [2], catalogs every canonical appearance by every significant Marvel character. Thus, the “significant characters” represented by nodes in our network and the “significant appearances” that yield the links in it are, actually, nothing but those characters and appearances currently included in the MCP database. Nevertheless, all in all, this database collects over 96,000 appearances by more than 6,500 characters in about 13,000 comic books, and thus yields quite a complete picture of the Marvel Universe.