Analyzing Locations used in the X-Men Comics

The X-Men was and continues to be one of the most notorious comic book series, bringing exciting characters and thrilling storylines to the superhero genre. Throughout the series, the X-Men travel to and fight in many different locations, both geographically real and fictional. This location mapping project aims to examine the various locations used in the first 50 Uncanny X-Men comic issues in the late 1970’s, and what locations were favored for these comics over others.

SOURCES:

The data used from this project was collected from www.claremontrun.com, a free open-source database containing data that is meant to analyze and draw conclusions about Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men comic spinoffs that ended up being a huge success. The specific data used for this project can be found here:

PROCESS

This data was first cleaned using Open Refine, mainly to re-cluster a lot of similar locations. In the merging process, any kinds of indicators to convey doubt about the location were ignored (i.e.. “Australia” and “Australia*?” would be merged to “Australia). A text facet was then used to find the counts of the most common general locations (countries and U.S. states) in the data. The next step was to sift through each location listed in the facet and manually merge locations that fell under the same general region (i.e.. the labels “L.A., California”, “San Francisco” and “Los Angeles” both fall under “California”). This was by far the most time-consuming part of the data cleaning, as there are some buildings and locations listed that are fictional but existed in real geographical areas, so some research was required to find out where these fictional parts were located (e.g., the “X-Mansion” is located in New York). After the counts for each general region were obtained, the counts were thrown into a base world map in Flourish, and a GPS website was used to find the longitude and latitude of each general location.

PRESENTATION

The embedded map above is a world map showing the most popular general locations used in the comics. The size of each circle point is proportional to the number of times that general area is used in a comic, and the map can be interacted with by hovering over each circle to see the number of times that location is used. The map embedded below is a heat map that aims to merge these general areas to show the more common international areas.

DISCUSSION

As we can see in these maps, there are clearly more common locations than others. One factor that influences this is where the main fictional locations are in the series. For example, while there are still plenty of fight scenes in New York, that is also the location of the X-Mansion, one of the most popular scene locations in the series. The X-Mansion also contains the “Danger Room”, where numerous scenes are also located. Additionally, there are a number of scenes taking place in Genosha, a fictional mutant paradise located in Madagascar, so there is some activity there in the maps as well. Conversely, we can also see some areas of the world that were not as common in the series. In fact, the entire continents of South America and Aisa saw barely any activity.

There are a couple of pitfalls that must be acknowledged about the approach to this data visualization. First, there are numerous “unspecified locations” in the data, as well as locations that could not be represented on a world map (dreamscapes, space, etc.), so we cannot say that this is a complete representation of every location used in the first 50 issues. Additionally, it should be mentioned that in the merging process, locations that expressed some form of doubt or questioning (e.g. “Florida?” or “Sydney, Australia**”) were not omitted from the used data.

By analyzing the geographical patterns in the Uncanny X-Men comics, it could help us understand ways in which geography and locational significance is incorporated into fictional narratives, and it could help us potentially connect political and social trends to fictional storylines. Additionally, it could help us understand how the imaginary locations in pop culture (i.e. spaceships, the “danger room”, etc.) reflect cultural aspirations or anxieties at the time.