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[1] 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- the first 3 pages from the unpublished Mandrake story "Seeing is Believing".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
Most Frequent Characters
A Bootstrap Consensus Tree analysis for the 100-1000 MFC 3-grams branches
MFW 2-gram
MFC 3-gram
