Apoorva Ajmani, Ramesh Balasekaran College of Information Studies, University of Maryland College Park
In the mighty world of comics, book publishers like DC Comics and Marvel Comics hold a combined market share of almost 70% ( R. Johnston, 2016 ). The competition between these two comic book publishers has given birth to thousands of new characters that attracts wider audience and also targeted demographics. As a result, there is an exponential increase in the quantity of data in the world of comics which originated in the early 1930’s. The rapid increase in quantity of data and it's time-oriented nature adds to the complexity.
Comic lovers now span across multiple generations and face a big challenge in comprehending the origin and history of a character which they start to follow. Typically these fans are not computer experts and require an easy-to-use application that provides narrative visualization by consuming the time-oriented bland categorical data from multiple sources and provides users with direct manipulation that aides in interactive storytelling.