Finding the most popular superhero in a social graph

Believe it or not, there's actually a publicly available dataset, where someone figured out all the appearances that Marvel superheroes had with each other in different comic books. We can use that to figure out relationships between superheroes in the Marvel Universe and other aspects of them that we might find interesting. Let's start off with a simple example, where we just try to find the most popular superhero in the Marvel dataset. Is Spider-Man or The Hulk the most commonly appearing superhero in Marvel Comics? Well, the answer might surprise you. Let's go dig in and find out.

Superhero social networks

We have a superhero social network that someone constructed, just by looking at what comic books characters appeared in together. So the idea is that if a comic book character appeared together with another comic book character in the same comic book, they're considered to be friends, they have a co-occurrence and they are therefore...