Marvel vs. Dc.
This is the age old question of most superhero fans everywhere. You are either Marvel or DC, and very rarely are you both. What is this choice based off of? Is it a popularity contest, or is one better than the other? I decided to take a look at the true Marvel vs. DC contest, in its original form. Comics. So how could we look at this? Well, if it’s a popularity contest, who was the most popular? I decided to look at cold hard facts first. Who had the most appearances in the comics? Who were are top superheros? What about female superheros? And villians? So using a FiveThirtyEight data set, I began my quest to find out, who truly was the most popular. Marvel or DC.
I began by looking at total amount of appearances, versus the amount of years they had been in the comics. Just because they had been around longer, does not mean that they were the most popular. So I came up with an average of appearances per year they had been in the comics and this gave me my totals.
Overall, Marvel had the most popular characters. With only a few DC favorites, Superman being number one overall, it was clear who the winner here was. Marvel characters by far beat out DC in the overall popularity, but Superman was still the most popular.
What about the women?
Well overall, Marvel won that as well. There was only one woman superhero in the entire top ten that was a DC character, which is Kora Zor-El, aka, Superwoman. So far, the top DC is still Superman and Superwoman, but, Marvel is beating out DC, overall.
Villians?
So then I took a look at the villans. And yet again I am seeing a trend here. Lex Luther, from Superman, is number one. But the rest of the popular villans are still all marvel characters. In fact, almost all of them are from the Earth 616 series.
The Earth 616 series, is the most popular Marvel X-men series. This being said, since X-men is such a large series, it stands to reason that X-men is just more popular than most of the DC comics. However, Superman is more popular than the X-men series. So again, I’m back to my original question, which one is truly more popular?
This is probably a question that can’t be truly answered. But overall, I’m showing proof that Superman and X-men are both popular in the comics.
I wanted to see if there was any correlation between the appearances, the sex of the character, and the alignment of the character. Would the fact that they were female, change the amount of appearances they had? Would the fact that they were a neutral character change things? I ran some tests, and it was pretty obvious, there was no correlation between any of these variables.
So how could I check my work?
I did a poll, using multiple facebook groups. I got responses from all over the U.S. and even internationally. I had over 200 people respond, and with those responses, I compared the most popular choices, with the most appearances.
I chose D.C. Villians to check my work because that’s actually my personal favorite, but could have used any of the groups I checked.
Results
Overall, there really wasn’t a lot of correlation. Joker was the most popular with the poll, but Lex Luther was more popular by appearances.
In the end, I can’t really answer, which is more popular, but I had a ton of fun trying to find out!