I found an article on Facebook about how women are getting tattoos of the letters NC like in the Bitch Planet comic book. This intrigued me so I thought I would read more about it. Interestingly, Bitch Planet had a solid outing for an indie feminist comic. And when asked about getting a tattoo from a comic book that's only had a few issues released, women en masse had a great response: If you think we got a tattoo because of the comic, you've missed the point. Check out some of the tattoos here. It almost makes me want one. But I'll probably stick to drawing with a sharpie.
For some reason, I was super fascinated with this and wanted to do a viz that had a comic book feel. I kept thinking about it but the data wasn't in a readily consumable format (that I could find). So I cobbled it together (you know I mean business when I assemble data).
About the Viz
I wanted a Kirby crackle background but it seemed too distracting (plus, I'm not very good at doing Kirby crackle). Because I wanted to pay homage to illustrators, I used pencils to provide the background. I found some of the analysis intersting (like the female Thor totally kicked ass and outsold the Odinson). I also learned a more about the different publishers and that there's a Jem comic that was recently released. I took some liberties. I estimated sales volume to the publishers by taking a percentage of a typical sales price. I'm sure if I did way more research, I could get more exact with it, but in my mind, I wanted to have an idea of how much money publishers were grossing. I also did a little research to select the comics analyzed...they represent the comics that kept coming up as feminist comics.
Also note, I'm not completely happy with this viz. In terms of formatting, I feel like some font and color choices could be improved. But, since I sat on this for awhile after I had it basically done, I just wanted it out becaus if I kept trying to work on it, I wouldn't get it published. So I say all of this to say: I know there are improvements just can be made (I mentioned my top two), so don't rip me a new one because the colors might be perceived as jarring. I tried to choose the colors to represent the comics.
I would love to see how others might visualize this data or how I might improve upon it with more time. I think I need a vizcation to just focus on data viz 😊.
Check it out the viz below. Clicking the viz will link to the interactive viz on Tableau Public. Oh and just to note: I'm not a super fan of comics nor am I pretending to be one...I was just intrigued by the story! Special thanks to Matt Francis for helping me troubleshoot some formatting issues I had with Story Points.
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