Comic history comes in easy to digest infographics in Tim Leong’s ‘Super Graphic’
Tim Leong’s book “Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe” is mash up of the entire history of comic book publishing with a particularly savvy Powerpoint presentation. The book, out Aug. 1, is a hyper obsessive breakdown of all quantifiable (and some unquantifiable) aspects of comic, covering things such as a flow chart of who’s who in Sin City; comparing the fictional fortunes of super rich characters like Lex Luthor, Bruce Wayne and Richie Rich; and a bar chart of 70 years of Wonder Woman’s legs.
Supergraphic is nearly 200 pages of venn diagrams, Pantone style costume color comparisons and insanely complex family trees, the kind a crazy person stalking Stan Lee might draw on their walls. But Leong assures us he is not crazy; just a dude who loves charts and grew up reading comics. And the charts he makes are a zen like breakdown of the often chaotic world of strange superheroes and twisted story arcs.
Leong was immersed in charts as the former director of digital design at Wired Magazine; he also is the founder of Comic Foundry, which covered comics news and features and published five issues before it closed in 2009.
Where did you get the idea to do such a complicated book?
I love comic books. I loved infographics after working at Wired. It just seemed like a natural combination. I had the idea for it a couple of years ago. I went to Comic Con a couple years ago, started to take notes, record as much data as I could. I did charts based on the Comic Con experience. Those were the first ones I built. That’s when I said, “Oh ok, this could actually work as a thing.”
It’s all so simple in chart form.
This book must have involved some intense research. How did you possibly put it together?
Comics have been around for many many many years. There actually hasn’t been that great of record keeping throughout history. Characters change companies, companies change. It’s difficult, with different people writing the same character for 50 years. There was no standard of record for that stuff.
It was mix of things I thought of, versus times I found an interesting data set and said “How can I reverse engineer a chart out of this data set?” Once you get in the groove and the rhythm of doing it, it gets way easier.
Where did you find these data sets?
I would find guides to x y z, a something handbook. I was doing a lot of research online, a lot of maps. Anytime there was something quantifiable: Books that had data in them, maps, actually going through actual comics. One of [the charts] was a kill counter in The Walking Dead. I had to go back to each issue one by one, zombie or human. It sounds like a lot of work. I can think of much worse research.
There was a lot of meticulous research, like counting the number of Vs in V for Vendetta, which is really only done by counting the Vs. It wasn’t all glamorous.
Which chart are you most proud of?
The Batman relationship chart, or the taxonomy of animal names.
That actually took quite a long time, just because there’s such a long lineage of characters. There’s some weird people in there too. Armless Tiger Man. I’ve never heard of him before. He was in a machine accident that cut off his arms. He’s good at working with feet and fueled by a hatred of machinery.
Do you see a rise in infographics in the media as a whole?
Absolutely. People have better access to data now, people are tracking it better. The tools to create infographics are becoming easier and more widespread.
How did you first get into comics?
I’ve been into comics since I was a kid. Reading Superman and Spider-Man and I’m sure a lot of really terrible stuff. It got the hooks in me really early in life and stayed with me until now.
There’s something about them; I just love the storytelling. It’s just great escapism.
The fun part of all of this is that I’ve only read a fraction of the comics that have come out in my life, and I’ve obviously missed so much before that. That’s kind of the great thing about comics: no matter how much you’ve read, there’s always something really cool out there you haven’t read yet.
—
Email us at parallelworlds@nypost.com.
Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NYPost_PW and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/NYParallelWorlds.