Spotlight on stylometric text analysis - King Comics stories

King Comics stories

When the Mandrake the Magician series were published by King Comics in 1966-1967 the writers of the stories were uncredited.

Martin O'Hearn mentions that singular expressions like: "Suffering Hannah", "Great suffering Caesar", "Yipes" and "Thunderation" were interjections Dick Wood usen in several other non-Mandrake stories. In addition Martin O'Hearn also mentions that Jerry Siegel told that he wrote one Mandrake story. In Robin Snyder's The Comics Vol 27, No.2 (February 2016), Gary Poole is listed as writer for several of the Mandrake stories.

Looking at the Mandrake series at GCD the writer of two Mandrake stories still are unknown: "The Phantom Casino" and "The Black Wizard". But "Great suffering Caesar" and "Yipes" are used in "The Phantom Casino", so it should be written by Wood.

corpus

The corpus consists of:

• the Mandrake stories from the Mandrake series.
  • Dick Wood: "Menace of the City Jungle", "The Flying Phantom", "Specter from Space", "The Phantom Casino", "The Doomsday Man" and "The Terror of the Haunted Desert".
  • Unknown: "The Black Wizard"
  • Gary Poole: "The Frame-Up", "Cape Cod Caper", "The Fear Mongers", "Incredible Space Menace", "Jungle Drums" & "Return of King Lothar" and "The Haunting of Hawk Inn".
  • Giovanni Fiorentini: the translated stories "The Telltale Doll" and "Terror from Outer Space" (revised by Gary Poole).
• the first 3 pages from the unpublished Mandrake story "Seeing is Believing".
• the Mandrake stories from the Flash Gordon series.
  • "Midnight with Mandrake" (Dick Wood), "The Laughing Clown Caper" and "The Little Giant".
• the Mandrake stories from the Phantom series.
  • "Midnight with Mandrake", "Arsonist and Old Rags" (Gary Poole) and "Man on the Bridge" (Gary Poole).
• the 4 Phantom stories printed in the Mandrake series.
  • "SOS Phantom", "The Pirate Raiders", "The Magic Ivory Cage" and "The Girl Phantom" (Dick Wood).
• the 5 Brick Bradford stories from the Mandrake series.
• the 5 part Secret Agent X-9 story from the Flash Gordon issues 4-8. First part written by Archie Goodwin, and from third part written by Gary Poole.

Analysis using R

Bootstrap Consensus Tree

The "The Telltale Doll" was removed from the corpus. The story is probably written by another unknown author, and made a mess in the following analysis.

Most Frequent Words

The analysis for the 100-1000 MFW 2-grams branches into four main branches. One for the regular Mandrake stories, the Brick Bradford stories and the Secret Agent X-9 stories. The shorter Mandrake and Phantom stories are a bit more branched for the characters.

• the Brick Bradford stories
• the Secret Agent X-9 stories
  • Goodwin likely wrote the second part
• the regular Mandrake stories
  • "The Black Wizard" is between the stories by Wood and Poole
• the 3 pages from the unpublished Mandrake story
  • Poole likely wrote "Seeing is Believing"
• the shorter Mandrake stories
  • Wood likely wrote "Laughing Clown Caper" and "The Little Giant"
  • Poole likely wrote "Midnight with Mandrake"
• the shorter Phantom stories
  • if Wood wrote "The Girl Phantom" he likely also wrote "SOS Phantom" and "The Pirate Raiders"
  • Poole likely wrote "The Magic Ivory Cage"

Most Frequent Characters

The analysis for the 100-1000 3-grams branches a little differently:

• the Brick Bradford stories
  • as above
• the Secret Agent X-9 stories
  • as above, but with part 5 together with Poole's regular Mandrake stories.
• the regular Mandrake stories
  • "The Black Wizard" is with "The Doomsday Man" by Wood
  • strangly, Wood's "Specter from Space" and Pool's "The Fear Mongers" branches together
• the 3 pages from the unpublished Mandrake story
  • "Seeing is Believing" is between the stories by Wood and Poole
• the shorter Mandrake stories
  • "Midnight with Mandrake" is between the stories by Wood and Poole
  • "Laughing Clown Caper" and "The Little Giant" branches between the Mandrake stories by Poole and "The Girl Phantom"
• the shorter Phantom stories
  • if Wood wrote "The Girl Phantom" he likely also wrote "The Magic Ivory Cage"
  • "SOS Phantom" and "The Pirate Raiders" is between the stories by Wood and Poole

• 

  MFW 2-gram

• 

  MFC 3-gram

Summary

The analysis does not show a clear indication of who may be the author of the stories with an unknown author.