Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Superhero Social Web

By Regie Rigby

You know, there are times when I am forced to conclude that some people have too much time on their hands. Sometimes this is irritating. I tend to be annoyed by people who spend vast amounts of time standing in line to get the latest games system (apparently when the PS3 came out there were people who waited in line for three days so they could be the first on their block to have the console – seriously guys get out more!) or buy the latest Harry Potter novel. (I love Potter as much as the next guy, but really, he’s not worth trekking into town at midnight for…).

But just occasionally somebody takes their outrageous amounts of free time and does something so outrageous with it that you just have to stand in awe and applaud. Step forward Pablo M. Gleiser, of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, Buenos Aires. (The link takes you to a website written in Spanish.)

What Gleiser has done is truly remarkable. Basically he sat down one day (well, OK, I’m assuming he had help, and I’m guessing it took more than a day, but you get the general idea…) and worked out the social webs inhabited by the characters in the Marvel Universe. In all, his study took in six thousand four hundred and eighty six characters, spread out over a whopping twelve thousand nine hundred and forty two individual comics.

Seriously, I suspect I’m in the wrong job. Serious scientific research for a reputable academic institution that basically involves reading nearly thirteen hundred comics? Where do I sign?!
I have to confess at this point that although I’ve read the paper in question (available as a .pdf file here) I don’t think I’ve quite grasped the true significance of its findings to the physics community (the report seems to have been put together by the physics dept – although it’s the first week of term and my brain isn’t really functioning properly so I my have mis-read that), but the basic conclusions are very interesting.

Basically Gleiser has started from the premise that characters are linked if they appear in the same comic as each other, and plotted out who is linked to who, who has the most contacts, and who is at the centre of each social “web”. Apparently the social networks which show up in the comics mimic real life social networks rather closely, which at least on the face of it would seem to suggest that the writers at Marvel have created a pretty realistic world.

Oh, and it gets better.

It seems that the Superheroes in the social networks are real social hubs. They are the “alpha” people that others cluster around – they’re all connected to each other, and everyone else is connected to them. Far from being the lonesome misfits they pretend to be, the study shows that the Marvel heroes are in fact the “popular kids” of the Marvel U. When considered through the lens of Gleiser’s methodology. It’s the villains who show up as the outsiders, the “billy no mates” characters.

And you know what, I’m in two minds about that. There’s a bit of me saying, “well no wonder they’re villains – they’re striking back against the society that rejected them!” I can’t help it – I’m a teacher, and that makes me a liberal almost by default. There’s another part of me of course that is shouting “stuff that – lots of people are alienated by society, that doesn’t make them dress up like a giant Rhino, meld with alien symbiotes or fly around causing havoc on a bat glider!”

Then, you’ll be relieved to know, there’s a bit of me that is pointing out that the Marvel Universe isn’t real, and the methodology of the study is flawed. Because if you consider the Marvel Universe for even a moment it’s clear that it really isn’t like real life, and there’s a reason the Superheroes are the centre of every network.
The study made the assumption that characters were linked if they appeared in the same comics. Well, OK. There’s a grain of sense in that – in the real world, you might consider that people were linked if they showed up in the same building. But at the same time this obviously weights the data in favour of the heroes, because it’s the heroes who dominate the books.

It’s the hero’s name on the front cover, for a start. It’s the hero who is the centre of the story. It’s the hero who is generally the main focus of our attention. Often, the heroes appear either in each other’s books, in crossovers, or as team members in JLA or X-Men style team books. This, frankly, seldom happens to the villains.
It seems to me that what we have here is the mistaken imposition of science onto art. I’m sure it’s true that the “social webs” that operate within the Marvel Universe bear a superficial resemblance to reality, superficial is all the link is. In fact, I suspect that real life actually resembles the “reality” that is experienced by the Marvel heroes.

Your average Marvel hero is, after all, more often than not in a precarious situation. Whether it’s dear old Peter Parker trying to hide his identity to protect his family, bumbling along in a series of low profile jobs trying to make ends meet while spending most of his time doing unpaid crime fighting, or Wolverine, ruthlessly persuing the truth, and whoever is unfortunate enough to be his prey across the world with the whole of the establishment on his heels, life for your average Marvel Hero is tough. More often than not they are misunderstood, mistrusted and hated at least as much as the villains they seek to protect the people from. They do what they do not because it makes them popular, or rich, or famous, but because it is right.

Now, call me a cynical old git, but doesn’t that make them utterly unrealistic?

It’s nice when academics take us seriously – after decades of being regarded as nothing more than reading fodder fit only for kids and semi-literates, it’s good that academe takes a proper interest. But I can’t help thinking that the study is both flawed and misleading in this case. So tell me – what am I missing?