Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Marvel Universe collaboration network, revealing it shares many structural properties with real-world social networks, thus providing insights into the principles underlying complex network formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Marvel Universe network exhibits key features of real social networks, offering a model to understand the principles of network structure formation.

Findings

The Marvel network is not random and shares characteristics with real social networks.

It exhibits properties like clustering and degree distribution similar to real-world networks.

The study helps identify underlying principles of network formation.

Abstract

We investigate the structure of the Marvel Universe collaboration network, where two Marvel characters are considered linked if they jointly appear in the same Marvel comic book. We show that this network is clearly not a random network, and that it has most, but not all, characteristics of "real-life" collaboration networks, such as movie actors or scientific collaboration networks. The study of this artificial universe that tries to look like a real one, helps to understand that there are underlying principles that make real-life networks have definite characteristics.