I am interested in the answer to this question: “who are the top 5 most interconnected superheroes?” (As in, the superheroes most enumerably involved with other heroes.) Only somewhat, however, am I interested in the factual answer to this question; much more interesting is the way that each individual might answer this question, and the observations which can be made about both them individually based on their answers, and the observations which can be made about different aspects of society based on the commonalities and differences between individual answers.
“Don’t look it up!” Is one of my friend Dick Masterson’s many catchphrases between his shows The Biggest Problem in the Universe and The Dick Show. “I want to know what you think the answer is,” he insists, because “the stats can lie.” By this he means that a large number of reported-on statistics are presented duplicitously and with the financial supervision of special interest groups. One could certainly find, if not through report than through individually counting every superhero crossover, the factual answer to my question: but depending on my reason for interest in this data and what I might try to extrapolate from it, that data could be used to create a totally out-of-context understanding of reality.
Considering the long history of comic books, and the fact that in spite of comics-inspired media dominating the audio-visual mediums currently, traditional comics are not the most popular they have ever been in the accelerated internet age, it is very possible that one of the most interconnected superheroes is an older one who isn’t especially popular anymore; and therefore might not even be among the top answers depending on how many people and what kinds of people I ask the question to. But if my intention with my question was to find out who was currently considered the most interconnected superhero, it wouldn’t be helpful for me to be divorced from the historical context of the statistics in knowing the real answer.
Ideally for what I want out of the answer, I would ask comic book fans of a broad range of age, knowledge of the medium’s history, and involvement therein. I’d like answers from comic store owners, comic book writers and illustrators, and people who study the medium academically, too. Ultimately I want to know who was seen as the most interconnected hero from many perspectives across the history of the medium, so that I can trace the whole evolution of cultural understanding of the characters. I’ll never have as good of a sense of it as if I’d been tracking the answers from the start of comic history, and in the time it takes to get all the answers I want, many of them will start changing, but at least I think I could entertain myself by bringing this question into conversations with anyone I’d expect to get something out of trying to answer it.
Probably Squirell Girl, since she Is a comic fangirl and has meta powers, thus she is selfaware of being a comic book character and can travel between them.
Or Death. A universal concept, personified.