At first, this book appeared to me as a funny and light summery read. Still, I went ahead with my analytic process with one question in mind: what is the purpose of this work? Quite a hard question to answer when it comes to non-classified books because they don't fit in a specific genre. A couple of minutes later, looking at the beautiful graphs included in this book, it dawned on me: that author wants to incorporate very odd and non-classified pieces of information in a book that will appeal to a large audience.
That finding in mind, I would define that work as a small collection of facts. Whether they are expressed by a coloured graph or by a cartoony statistic model, you will learn a lot of things you never thought existed (such as how many superheroes wear a certain colour). This is the part I liked the most about this book because it is a very accurate tool for someone who wants to evaluate or study marginal aspects of comics and cartoons world, but, at the same time, it could be used by a novice reader who wants to know the basics component of this universe.
Plus, as suggested in the title, the author focused on the visual aspect of his work. Consequently, visual learners and readers will be very satisfied, whereas other types of readers might find it limited.
Overall, this book is an interesting piece of visual art and it contains accurate and useful marginal pieces if information about comics and superheroes. I would recommend it to those who already love comic books and the world of this genre and also to those who want to study that type of literature for the first time. I wouldn't recommend it to readers who love deep and complex thoughts and who want to learn more than the basics of that world. ( )

Intermittently interesting, but suffering from a multiple personality disorder. Some of the charts were helpful and interesting explications of some aspect of superherodom (e.g. the time elapsing between a major character's death and their eventual resurrection) while other charts were just plain silly (I can barely remember the silly ones, but they'd be a picture of, say, Captain America's shield, with a legend claiming the white parts are the amount of time spent attacking, the red parts are the amount of time spent defending, and the blue part the amount of time spent resting. Not helpful, not true, and someone who makes charts should know humans are good at seeing difference in length but not area!)

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve! ( )

To follow theme I decided to pick up an older non fiction book that is also focused on super heroes.

Super Graphic is a collection of infographics based on a wide variety of comics and graphic novels.

I really liked the layout of this book as each infographic had a title and a little bit of text to explain it. This allowed for easy skipping should the pages be on a comic you had 0 interest in.

There was also a nice variety of stats used, some were a bit more personal and humorous wheras others were very factual.

Whilst I did enjoy this and can see it being an enjoyable read for some its definitely for an older audience than the first book mentioned and if you’re not big on statistics it might be a pass for you.

As mentioned, humour was dotted throughout. Sometimes the design of the infographic reflected a heroes mask or logo and sometimes the information included adult humour like “shoots white sticky stuff”. Hey its about Spider-Man you filth.

My favourite two are the ones that I’d actually love to see updated versions of: The Punisher’s Kill Count and Power Publishers.

The first because I’d love to see the recent Netflix series added to it and the secomd because I think it’d be really interesting to see how publishing has changed since 2013.

Overall a nice read to flick through but its unlikely I’d re-read it. ( )

Very fun! ( )

Very well done. ( )