Today I’m featuring a novel about graphic novels, which is called Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universie. Specifically, I’m featuring statistical (think bar and pie charts, graphs, and venn diagrams) on various graphic novel characters. Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Sin City, The Watchmen, and even The Walking Dead characters are in here. This book may not seem like a lot of fun (how can statistical information be anything but dry?) BUT you won’t be disappointed. There’s a Who’s Who flow chart for Sin City characters. There’s also a Comic-Con Attendance chart where you can see how attendance has steadily increased from 145 people in 1970 to over 130,000 in 2012 (and probably rising). Not everything should be taken seriously. For example, there’s a chart on why guys like the Invisible Women. It’s invisible just so you’re not disappointed. But some charts require lots of research like the bar graph on the Lifespans of characters in The Walking Dead series. By the way, women survive an average of 17 issues as opposed to men who last about 19 issues. To see a sampling of what kind of graphs I’m talking about, click here.
By day, the author, Time Leong, is Director of Digital Design at Wired Magazine and it definitely shows given the layout. I highly recommend the book if you’re looking for a few laughs or for some great information on comic book characters, their creators, or even comparative information on parallel universes in comic books.
Read an interesting interview with the author. And here’s a link to the website for the book.