Comic Characters

This folder contains data behind the story Comic Books Are Still Made By Men, For Men And About Men.

The data comes from Marvel Wikia and DC Wikia. Characters were scraped on August 24. Appearance counts were scraped on September 2. The month and year of the first issue each character appeared in was pulled on October 6.

The data is split into two files, for DC and Marvel, respectively: dc-wikia-data.csv and marvel-wikia-data.csv. Each file has the following variables:

"Women were substantially underrepresented among characters with at least one appearance. Among the characters for which we have gender data,12 females made up only 29.3 percent of the DC character list and 24.7 percent of the Marvel roster.

The same trend bears out when we look at characters with higher appearance counts. When we zero in on the 2,415 DC and 3,342 Marvel characters with gender data who appear at least 10 times — the set of characters that probably gives the most consistent view of what we see on the page — female characters make up only 30.9 percent of the DC universe and 30.6 percent of the Marvel universe.13
When we focus on only the most frequently appearing characters in each universe — the stars of the show — the data changes. Of characters with gender data and 100 or more appearances (294 DC characters and 414 Marvel characters), only 29.0 percent of DC’s are female, and a similar 31.1 percent of the Marvel crowd is." - Excerpt from the article provided above.

This data was obtained from the FiveThirtyEight collection of datasets.