# Impact of Incomplete Data on Character Network Extraction: The Case of Comics

Pádraig Maccarron, Vincent Labatut, Jochen Garcke

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Pádraig Maccarron, Vincent Labatut, Jochen Garcke. Impact of Incomplete Data on Character Network Extraction: The Case of Comics. International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSci), Network Science Society, Jun 2025, Maastricht, Netherlands. hal-05140156

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Submitted on 2 Jul 2025

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# Impact of Incomplete Data on Character Network Extraction: The Case of Comics

P. MacCarron<fnref n="1" />, V. Labatut<fnref n="2" />, J. Garcke<fnref n="3" />

1. MACSI, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

2. Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon – LIA UPR 4128, Avignon Université, Avignon, France

3. Institute for Numerical Simulations, Bonn University, Germany

Most of humanity's literature has been lost<fnref n="1" />,<fnref n="2" />. For example, of the eight Trojan epics, only the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* have survived in full. Similarly, in medieval Irish manuscripts, we frequently encounter the names of sagas that we do not have. A commonality between many culture's myths and epics, is that they frequently have shared characters. These could be a culture's deities, like the Norse gods, or heroes in the aforementioned Trojan epics. In the case of the classics and medieval literature, having shared characters in many narratives allows us to create and study a large social network.

In previous analyses of sagas and epic literature (eg.<fnref n="3" />), centrality measures such as the betweenness centrality strongly correlate with character importance (similar results are found in Russian literature<fnref n="4" />). When combining sagas, such as the sagas of the Icelanders<fnref n="3" />, or medieval Irish sagas<fnref n="5" />, the central characters are also easily found from the network properties. However, a key issue with this analysis is that we have no accurate estimate for how much of the social network is intact, even when creating one with all available narratives from one culture. Recent estimates, show that the amount of texts in medieval manuscripts that survived could vary from 30% to 80%<fnref n="6" />, however these tend to be more gospel than literature and are also frequently incomplete, so there are no available estimates for how much medieval literature has been lost.

Of course, we do not have access to all these missing texts. However, modern comic books can be considered as a "modern mythology", and used as a proxy. In this study, we focus on Marvel and DC, two of the largest comic-book publishing houses in the world, both founded in the late 1930s. As shown in the left panel of Figure 1, they both have a substantial publishing activity, with an average of 500 comics per year since the 1960s. We use data from the Grand Comics Database to obtain estimates for the effect of source loss from a complex-networks perspective.

We perform simulations representing information loss (random edge removal) and source loss (random comic removal). We split the comics into periods of years known as "ages" which are pre-defined by the comic-book community. In the right panel of Figure 1, we show the Jaccard coefficient for the top 10 characters by betweenness centrality $J_b$ in DC's Copper Age removing up to half of the edges at random. The simulation is repeated 1,000 times and the mean $J_b$ is shown (surrounded by 95% distributional limits). The lower quantile shows regions of high stability where some of the top connected characters do not change. Losing half of the interactions means five of the most central DC characters are no longer always as important in the network.

Performing simulations on the different ages, for different sets of characters, and using random-comic loss or random-edge loss, all results are similar: once a large number of information is lost, some of the central characters become less important to the network. This has major implications for our understanding of central characters in world mythology.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: (Left) The number of comics per year for DC and Marvel. (Right) The Jaccard coefficient $J_b$ for the top 10 characters in DC's Copper Age simulating the random removal of up to half the edges.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="1">¹M. Morford & R. Lenardon *Classical mythology*. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²L. Canfora, *The vanished library: A wonder of the ancient world*. Vol. 7. Univ of California Press, 1990</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³P'. MacCarron & R. Kenna. *The European Physical Journal B* 86 (2013), pp. 1–9.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴Y. Tarasevich, A. Danilova, & O. Romanovskaya, *Advances in Complex Systems* 26.01 (2023), p. 2350001.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵P. MacCarron, *Condensed Matter Physics* 27.3 (2024)</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶Mike Kestemont et al. *Science* 375.6582 (2022), pp. 765–769.</footnote>