Doctor Doom in The Marvel Age: an empirical approach to transmedia character coherence

This thesis proposes a replicable, observation-based research strategy for assessing and measuring the way that fictional characters change and develop as they move between different media over time. It applies data design methodologies and statistical analysis to the field of Comics Studies and uses tools developed from current theories of transmedia storytelling to generate a new empirically driven thirteen-dimensional model of character coherence.
The model is tested using a sample of comics featuring the Marvel comics character Doctor Doom, derived from a corpus containing every appearance of the character in the evolving Marvel transmedia storyworld during 'The Marvel Age' from 1962 to 1987 - a period defined here using a Production of Culture approach. Further database and statistical methods are used to catalogue this corpus and define a representative sample (Conroy, 2004).
Finally, the tool developed using these methods is further tested on a selection of case studies using texts included in the corpus but not the core research sample, in order to demonstrate its use for future research.
The thesis therefore makes the following unique contributions to knowledge:
• A unified catalogue of transmedia character components
• An empirical definition of 'The Marvel Age'
• A tool, derived from the catalogue, which can be used to map character components as they change across time the sample and corpus
• Doctor Doom as a case study for early transmedia character

• https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9...
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