Both Marvel and DC Comics are widely known fictional universes, each with their own booming fan base, but where in that sea of people do we stand? We recently polled our Kennedy Catholic community to see just where our allegiances lie.
A poll was sent out to all of the students on February 23rd, 2021 requesting that they share their opinions on their favorite franchise and favorite character from that franchise and after closing on March 1st results rolled in. We collected 183 responses from the student body, with 167 of them opting to also answer the non-required question of favorite character. The breakdown for franchise is as follows: 74.9% for Marvel, 16.9% for DC, and 8.2% with no preference. While this clearly isn’t a response from every member of the Kennedy Catholic community, with Marvel having such a large lead we can deduce that it’s the clear winner for popularity.
Of the 183 people that responded to the overall question of favorite franchise, 167 of them also replied with their favorite character. We had to weed out 22 of those 167 responses for both graphs as they indicated no favorite character. With that said our data understandably indicated more favorite characters within the Marvel franchise since that was the popularity winner.
In total we received 29 different characters just from Marvel and while we had a large variety of choices available it’s interesting to see the great variation of favorites just among our community. We had so many different responses that we had to break marvel into two graphs! The top three most popular Marvel Characters were Spider Man, Iron Man, and a tie between Wanda Maximoff and Captain America with 31, 16, and 14 votes respectively.
With the DC franchise of course there was significantly less variation in the data. We only received 10 different characters for this group. Batman was the most popular character overall receiving 8 votes with The Joker and Wonder Woman tying for second place at 4 votes each and Harley Quinn and The Flash tying for third place with three votes each. With less variation of characters in this case we wound up with more overlap and ties between them.
Kennedy’s statistics are in line with our nation for favorite fictional world, but stray in terms of character. According to a recent study from OnePoll, Marvel was deemed to be more popular than DC in the United States, though the favorite overall superhero from both combined was Superman. Spider Man took home the trophy for favorite Marvel Character and Superman, surprisingly to most, was more popular than Batman in the DC front.
The vast worlds of superheroes are filled with characters that have been favorites for ages. These classic stories have been part of our lives for a long time and it’s interesting to see where our loyalties lie, both in general and within our school community.