In Search of Doom. Tracking a Wandering Character Through Data

This paper describes the process of generating a corpus of comics for an examination of the transmedial development of the character Doctor Doom during the period known as 'The Marvel Age'. It briefly defines what 'The Marvel Age' means in these terms, and describes the rationale for choosing which items should be included in the corpus. It then goes into some detail about the use of online comics databases, notably The Grand Comics Database, and describes the many difficulties inherent in the use of a dataset that has been collaboratively generated over a long period of time without clear editorial guidance, and suggests data-cleaning methods by which these issues can be mitigated. Finally, it discusses how this corpus will be used in future to analyse the progress of Doctor Doom’s characterisation through this period.

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