Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

By 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452129884

Tim Leong

Tim Leong is the design director at Entertainment Weekly magazine, founder of the Eisner Award–nominated Comic Foundry magazine, and author of Super Graphic. He lives in New York.

Book preview

Reviews for Super Graphic

[mithril_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well done.

[Andi Ipaktchi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although there are many references to outdated technology, overall it is full of
information that is useful today.

[Danielle Fedrigo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was an endearing, unique, and quick read that I learned a lot from!

[ashleytylerjohn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Intermittently interesting, but suffering from a multiple personality disorder. Some of the charts were helpful and interesting explications of some aspect of superherodom (e.g. the time elapsing between a major character's death and their eventual resurrection) while other charts were just plain silly (I can barely remember the silly ones, but they'd be a picture of, say, Captain America's shield, with a legend claiming the white parts are the amount of time spent attacking, the red parts are the amount of time spent defending, and the blue part the amount of time spent resting. Not helpful, not true, and someone who makes charts should know humans are good at seeing difference in length but not area!)

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!

[northernplunder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To follow theme I decided to pick up an older non fiction book that is also focused on super heroes.Super Graphic is a collection of infographics based on a wide variety of comics and graphic novels.I really liked the layout of this book as each infographic had a title and a little bit of text to explain it. This allowed for easy skipping should the pages be on a comic you had 0 interest in.There was also a nice variety of stats used, some were a bit more personal and humorous wheras others were very factual.Whilst I did enjoy this and can see it being an enjoyable read for some its definitely for an older audience than the first book mentioned and if you’re not big on statistics it might be a pass for you.As mentioned, humour was dotted throughout. Sometimes the design of the infographic reflected a heroes mask or logo and sometimes the information included adult humour like “shoots white sticky stuff”. Hey its about Spider-Man you filth.My favourite two are the ones that I’d actually love to see updated versions of: The Punisher’s Kill Count and Power Publishers.The first because I’d love to see the recent Netflix series added to it and the secomd because I think it’d be really interesting to see how publishing has changed since 2013.Overall a nice read to flick through but its unlikely I’d re-read it.