"At Marvel we're constantly trying to understand our characters and stories better so that we can better present those to you, our fans. ( Also, we are big data nerds. ) As part of this effort we focused some sophisticated data analysis tools on the world's most interesting social network — the Marvel Universe. The result is what you see above: in each image, every node represents a character and each line represents a shared appearance between two characters ( in some of the graphs, the thickness of the line corresponds to the number of shared appearances )."