Superhero’s — DC comics vs. Marvel

I have very briefly looked at superhero data that FiveThirtyEight had on their GitHub (you can find it here). I have visualized some statistics and mostly made comparisons between superhero’s from DC comics and superhero’s from Marvel.

To begin with I just want to conclude that both data sets have missing data. But for this occasion this was not a big problem. It could be handled when the missing values appeared.

Short about the findings

The first time a DC comics superhero appeared was in 1935 and the first time a Marvel superhero. appeared was is 1939.

Marvel have in total introduced more superhero’s than DC comics. As you can see in the plot below there are more superhero’s in the Marvel universe than in the DC comics universe.

DC comics introduced the most characters in 2006 (a number of 303) and Marvel introduced most characters in 1993 (a number of 554). In the plot below you can see how the many superhero’s were introduced per year for DC comics and Marvel.

In the Marvel universe a majority of the superhero’s have a secret identity, but in the DC comics universe there are more superhero’s with a public identity than a secret identity.

Both DC comics and Marvel have a majority of superhero’s that are bad characters. Worth mentioning is also that Marvel have a bigger share of bad characters than DC comics.

Both DC comics and Marvel have a majority of superhero’s that are male. DC comics however have a bigger share of female characters than Marvel.

Out of the top 10 superhero’s that appear the most 8 out of 10 are from the Marvel universe. The most frequently appearing superhero is Spider-Man.

Marvel is better at keeping there superhero’s alive than DC comics. In the DC comics universe 75% are alive and 25% are deceased. In the Marvel universe 77% are alive and 23% are deceased.

In the DC comics universe 58% of the superhero’s with blue eyes and blond hair are good (30% are bad).

In the Marvel universe 46% of the female superhero’s that are alive are good (38% are bad).

There are a lot of more things that can be explored in the 2 datasets. I might revisit the sets in the future and write a new blog post about it. Hope you have enjoyed it so far.

If you are interested you can look at the Jupyter notebook in my GitHub.

/yhpf