After 70 years of publishing, Marvel Entertainment has built up an incredible universe of heroes, villains, and super teams–a sea of data that no mere wiki can organize. At long last, Marvel has embarked on a mighty quest of its own: to create an entirely new graph database and search system to conquer continuity malaise by visualizing each character across the Marvel Universe.
The time is now for a solution, and as Marvel cradles the newborn “Agents of SHIELD” and its upcoming Netflix tetrology, the company now depicts the same characters across multiple mediums, from comics to blockbuster movies. There’s a wealth of information out there, and it’s not pretty–holy massive backstory and hyperlinked contextually relevant other characters, Batman!
A Universe Of Power–And Complexity
The problem, like with any massive chunk of data, lies in getting the right data pieces in front of users–but for Marvel, the question becomes a semantic exercise. Just who is the character Hawkeye?
Well, he’s Clint Barton, except when he’s not; erstwhile sidekick Kate Bishop and villain Bullseye have taken the Hawkeye identity. He’s a member of the Avengers, except when he’s not; he’s also been part of the Thunderbolts and West Coast Avengers. He got his skills performing trick shots in a circus, except when he didn’t: He got them as an agent redeeming a murder conviction in the Ultimate universe and as a Black Ops SHIELD agent in the Marvel films.
You can see how fans who want to dig deeper into their favorite characters could be, ahem, easily waylaid.
It’s telling that I checked the above Hawkeye information on Wikipedia and the fan-curated Marvel wikis…and not on Marvel’s own wiki, which is clumsily organized, uncertain whether it wants to be an infodump or a recommendation engine for Marvel’s Unlimited subscription service.
To be fair, no current website gives me a clear vision of a character across universes: To do so, Marvel has charged Peter Olson, the VP of Web and Application Development at Marvel Entertainment, and his team to start from the ground up. And that means figuring out a way to make all this data–every interaction between hero and villain across multiple comic titles over decades of publishing history–make sense.