Studies in recent years have pointed out that the Marvel Universe is almost like a real social network. As ideological divisions increase in interaction in the realm of popular culture, Marvel, as an iconic cultural industry, creates content that to some extent reflects controversial cultural issues. However, as a profit-driven business, its actions serve marketing purposes as well. This article performs a social network analysis on a dataset of character partnership networks in the Marvel Comics universe collected by Aslak ^[1] using Ucinet, focusing on selected characters and their relationships among the network, and try to reveal how cultural diversity is being considered in the Marvel Universe contents. By examining the subgroup and centrality of the dataset, the article believes that the Marvel Universe’s narrative framework, which is constructed based on the real world, contains multiple individual and organisational nodes with complex individual-to-individual relationships and individual-to-organisation subordination relationships, reflecting real-world political and cultural tensions. Meanwhile, Marvel strategically shapes its new storylines around popular characters, but the cultural meanings of them is quite superficial and more of a marketing strategy.

Danyu Peng. The Marvel Universe’s Character Partnerships-Reflecting on Cultural Diversity and Marketing Strategy. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2024) Vol. 7, Issue 1: 80-88. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2024.070113.

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