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zwolanerd

I guess I just like liking things

Pac-Man graphs are the best graphs

Pac-Man graphs are the best graphs

Yesterday the Media Specialist where I work brought a book to me and said, “I think you’ll enjoy this.” She was right! It’s Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s 190 pages of graphs, the sort you’d see in year-end reports and PowerPoints all over the business world, only these graphs are about comic book characters: Batman, Superman, the Ninja Turtles, anime, Persepolis – all kinds of comics and all kinds of graphs. Seriously, there were types of graphs I’d never seen before and many I didn’t even understand.

Here’s just a smattering of the types of things graphed in the book:

  • Real vs. Fictional Metropolis
  • The Many Affiliations in the Marvel Universe
  • The Pizzas of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a lot of really disgusting ones, as it turns out!)
  • How DC Characters Rank in HeroClix
  • Character Weigh-In (How heavy is Juggernaut? Read and find out!)
  • The History of Comic Book Movies
  • Scrooge McDuck’s Family Tree
  • And on and on.

Again, there are many graphs in it I just plain don’t understand because I don’t know what that type of graph is supposed to demonstrate. However, even those pages were so visually interesting I couldn’t help but marvel (no pun intended) at them.

The amount of research that went into this book is astounding! The thought of how much information he had to gather, keep track of, and graph makes me as uncomfortable as watching behind-the-scenes videos of people making stop-motion movies. I like to think I’m detail-oriented, but in the face of these kinds of projects I have to admit that there’s “likes to make sure things are in order” and “Detail Oriented.”

If you’ve any interest in comics and the movies and games surrounding them, I’d recommend taking a look at this book. I’d never heard of it before but am I glad I was introduced to it.

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