Tim Leong

The comic book universe is adventurous, mystifying, and filled with heroes, villains, and cosplaying Comic-Con attendees. This book by one of Wired magazine's art directors traverses the graphic world through a collection of pie charts, bar graphs, timelines, scatter plots, and more. Super Graphic offers readers a unique look at the intricate and sometimes contradictory storylines that weave their way through comic books, and shares advice for navigating the pages of some of the most popular, longest-running, and best-loved comics and graphic novels out there. From a colorful breakdown of the DC Comics reader demographic to a witty Venn diagram of superhero comic tropes and a Chris Ware sadness scale, this book charts the most arbitrary and monumental characters, moments, and equipment of the wide world of comics.

A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

Super Graphic

Léa Beauchemin-Laporte

At first, this book appeared to me as a funny and light summery read. Still, I went ahead with my analytic process with one question in mind: what is the purpose of this work? Quite a hard question to answer when it comes to non-classified books because they don't fit in a specific genre. A couple of minutes later, looking at the beautiful graphs included in this book, it dawned on me: that author wants to incorporate very odd and non-classified pieces of information in a book that will appeal to a large audience. 
That finding in mind, I would define that work as a small collection of facts. Whether they are expressed by a coloured graph or by a cartoony statistic model, you will learn a lot of things you never thought existed (such as how many superheroes wear a certain colour). This is the part I liked the most about this book because it is a very accurate tool for someone who wants to evaluate or study marginal aspects of comics and cartoons world, but, at the same time, it could be used by a novice reader who wants to know the basics component of this universe.
Plus, as suggested in the title, the author focused on the visual aspect of his work. Consequently, visual learners and readers will be very satisfied, whereas other types of readers might find it limited. 
Overall, this book is an interesting piece of visual art and it contains accurate and useful marginal pieces if information about comics and superheroes. I would recommend it to those who already love comic books and the world of this genre and also to those who want to study that type of literature for the first time. I wouldn't recommend it to readers who love deep and complex thoughts and who want to learn more than the basics of that world.

Super Graphic A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

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