French students built an interactive celebration of Marvel comics' 75-year history
Keeping tabs on all of Marvel's superheros is pretty challenging work -- the company has been publishing comics for 75 years. Over 2,500 characters have lived in its pages, spanning more than 3,000 individual issues over more than 440 series. How did I know all that? Well, I stole the stats from Ultimate 75th, a student-made website that pilfer's Marvel's own database to celebrate 75 years of comics. Students at the Hétic school in France built the site in just four days using the REST API used on Marvel's official site. This allowed the group to pull comic and character data directly from the publisher's database. The result is impressive, but it isn't perfect.
Ultimate 75th correctly charts and catalogues most of the data Marvel offers up through its API, allowing users to sort through ever single year in the publisher's history and see what it was up to. Unfortunately, some elements are inaccurate: the site lists Amazing Spider-Man -- a series with over 700 issues under its belt - as having only 20 published issues. The hastily built database has a few bugs too: it has a tendency to freeze if you scroll through Marvel's history too fast.
Still, most of the data seems accurate, and the every year of data is accompanied by a fun fact. Did you know that Spider-Woman was originally created to preserve a trademark? I didn't. Check out the full experience for yourself -- it's a pretty entertaining way to while away the work day.
