This is more for fun than anything else. As you might imagine, the title basically gives away the thesis. That being said:

Notes

"Does this similarity in features represent some profound principle in human interaction? Or,
on the contrary, does any large network with some “collaboration� between nodes present
these characteristics? ... In this paper we want to contribute to a possible answer to these questions by analyzing a new collaboration network, that is artificial, but mimics real-life networks: the Marvel
Universe collaboration network. In it, the nodes correspond to Marvel Comics characters,
and two nodes are linked when the corresponding characters have jointly appeared in the
same Marvel comic book" (2).

"We considered therefore interesting to know if the Marvel Universe network’s artificial nature would resemble real-life collaboration networks, or, on the contrary, would rather look like a random collaboration network" (3).

And after a fair amount of math,

"Although to some extent the Marvel Universe tries to mimic human relations, and in par-
ticular it is completely different from a random network, we have shown that it cannot
completely hide its artificial origins. As in real-life collaboration and, in general, social net-
works, its nodes are on average at a short distance of each other, and the distribution of
collaborators shows a clear power-law tail with cutoff. But its clustering coefficient is quite
smaller than what’s usual in real-life collaboration networks" (12).

Thoughts

Okay, in other words, there is a small-world effect at play-- the diameter of the Marvel Universe is 5 (degrees of separation). And there are particular hubs (Captain America, Spiderman), with the distribution of degrees (connections) falling off according to power laws. But the place where the MU doesn't mimic real-world collaborative networks is in its clustering coefficient.

That's the probability that two people, each having linked to a third person, would themselves be connected. ("In most social networks, two nodes that are linked to a third one have a higher probability
to be linked between them: two acquaintances of a given person probably know each other" (9).)

A much lower clustering coefficient occurs in the MU, an artificially designed and executed social network, because it's highly hub-centric. That is, the characters in the Tail don't have their own titles, and so their only appearances are as guests and team-ups. No one worries much about the continuity of minor characters, so they appear as guests, disappear, and genuinely disappear from the network.

Also, because it is an artificial network, there are issues of property/ownership that enter into things. Certain artists and writers may "own" particular characters (like Bendis with Jessica Jones), such that their fortunes in the real world affect the characters' encounters in the MU. And then there are broader continuity issues in terms of the balance struck between the "eternal present" and the narrative value of the passage of time.

Still, fun stuff. One of the struggles that I'm sure I'll have to work through is the ability to communicate this stuff without math that I just don't have. And that without shortchanging the mathematics of it. I like to think that there's a happy medium.