The Marvel API | Hacker News Reader

The Marvel API

developer.marvel.com

239 pointsgavreh52 comments

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Seem a great way to get fans to write their promotional stuff for them, and also potentially profit from it.

They own and maintain the data, so it's not that outrageous.

It's a bit more transparent than someone like Twitter, who for a time let anyone use their API... and then just pulled the rug out from under it.

And it probably took some work to digitize and centralize all this information from their back catalog into a standard format

It's a great go-to for an API that provides relatable, recognizable data for a demo, class, or darn near anything else you build that doesn't need selling.

If I was still teaching I could see myself using it in a class, as a demo. One of the hardest things to come up with is good data, and enough of it, to keep students entertained with their assignments.

You think its okay to use WOLVERINE himself in any old demo?

He's the best there is, at what he does, which is illustrating REST APIs.

yeah, until you build it into a product that is used by developers and then when the Marvel API is down you can't work.

Looking at you, Elastic. Whatever shithead developer decided that was a good idea should be fired immediately. ESVM is the worst product you've ever made.

In the case of using an API to demonstrate how to use an API, the fact it might be unavailable is a feature. Waaaaaay too many developers write code that assumes a service will always be up.

For teaching in a class, I like https://github.com/BestBuy/api-playground. Let's you consume it and see how it is written while still having relatable content.

I've written an extensive reading list manager using the marvel API which I use personally. It's only a day or so of development from being publicly usable, and would really improve the experience of Marvel Unlimited for a lot of people.

This is why it will probably never be public. Why bother when I would have to cover all the hosting costs myself?

I love finding obscure APIs. Here's the Campbells Soup one: https://developer.campbellskitchen.com/

Ha! That's great. Thanks for sharing :)

Cool find - storytime!

Back in 2005ish, I worked for the digital agency that built and managed all of Campbells Kitchen's online properties, including the Campbells Kitchen recipe database. It might seem trivial now, but at the time it was at least a few years of its time in terms of using the power of databased driven webapps.

I also personally built the first ever CSS-based layout site for Campbells - it was the marketing site for V8 Juice. Up until that point, everything was still built with tables holding sliced images.

At the same time, the internal computers at Campbells corporate offices ran IE5.5, which had terrible CSS support.

So I literally built two versions of the site - one that would pass muster on their outdated internal computers, and another would drag them into the era of modern layouts and accessibility.

I learned SO MUCH working on those sites.

It looks like the current CK website has been turned into a Wordpress site so I assumed my original work is long gone, but it's very cool to see the legacy of Campbells Kitchen database I worked on kicking as an API.

I made a Go client for this a few years ago, not sure if it still works: https://github.com/imjasonh/go-marvel

I used it to make a gif of Uncanny X-Men covers throughout time: http://www.imjasonh.com/dump/2258.gif

Oh wow - seeing that much history and human effort zip by so quickly is enthralling. I want more!

Here ya go:

- Amazing Spider-Man: http://www.imjasonh.com/dump/1987.gif

- Fantastic Four: http://www.imjasonh.com/dump/2121.gif

Cool stuff! It's also interesting to see the price increasing gradually over time.

While watching this fly by, all I can hear is https://youtu.be/sAkL2-vh2Sk

A few years ago I built a toy app for the Marvel API as a code challenge for a consulting job: https://github.com/ceautery/sixDegreesOfSpidey

It's cute, but needs updated for a security vulnerability in jQuery, and I need to dig in and see why the mocha test for Absorbing Man got borked... although y'all are welcome to submit PRs if you're still looking for Hacktoberfest credits.

The README contains some of the oddities I found in the API, like some search types are more reliable than others, everyone eventually teams up with Iron Man or Wolvie, and the data is pretty incomplete (which makes sense if you have 79 years worth of data to compile from printed media).

* EDIT * - I've done the cardinal sin of leaving my API keys in the project. Marvel doesn't currently give you a way to generate new keys (that I could find), so enjoy while you can, but you should probably sign up your own account once my keys start hitting their API limit.

That reminds me of a project I've always wanted to do but keep putting on the backburner: for a while now, I've been wanting to scrape the Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators (UHBMCC) [0] and turn it into an actual database that I can run arbitrary queries on instead of just a collection of flat files (it's a very well-put-together collection of flat files, though). Fortunately they provide an offline version (in the form of CAB files of all things!) so I'd be able to do everything without hammering their server.

IMO, when it comes to Marvel comics, they're a much more useful resource than even the GCD (and part of this is their UI: it may be dated, but putting all the information for a series on one page is ten times better than the GCD's issue-by-issue interface).

(so, several years ago I did do some scraping of a very old version of the UHBMCC, but it's really outdated, I used some awful scraping tools, and I just stored everything in pickled Python objects rather than a database... if I were to start the project up again, I'd want to do it right from the start)

[0] http://maelmill-insi.de/UHBMCC/

It’s a little unsettling that the character they chose for the API’s splash page is Ultron.

Thanos would be way better. Thanos did nothing wrong!

Wrong: he had infinite power to do anything he wants so instead of doubling the food supply in the universe (duh!) he halves the population? Come on!

Or he could modify the reproduction rate of sentient species so the problem doesn't come back in 1-5 generations

Or he could alter his own brain so as to no longer care about overpopulation. For that, though, he doesn’t need the reality gem, he just needs the whiskey stone.

Exact power of Infinity Gauntlet is not defined in the movie, may be he couldn’t double whatever is required.

"There are strings on me"

Was just going to mention that. They could have put jarvis

Discussed in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7648860

I wish I could see the API docs w/out signing up. Like what endpoints are available, etc.

The Test Calls page (https://developer.marvel.com/docs) shows a list of end points.

Is that Swagger? It looks like it.

Yep, you can see swagger and swagger-ui keywords all through the source of that docs page.

In fact, they're still using Swagger 1.0[0] from 2011 which wasn't even formally specified, and currently-available copies of the spec[1] had to be unearthed from the wayback machine.

[0] https://gateway.marvel.com/docs/public [1] https://github.com/Mermade/swagger1/blob/master/versions/1.0...

Devs: SOAP is too baroque

Swagger: hold my beer

even on their call page, the credentials are invalid. fail.

It's available in the test calls section: https://developer.marvel.com/docs

I was in until they asked me to join their stupid rewards program to get an API key.

A colleague of mine created graph visualization of the entire Marvel ecosystem (content creators) several years back when the marvel API launched: Blog Post: http://allthingsgraphed.com/2015/04/09/a-matter-of-degrees/

Direct Link to generated SVG: http://allthingsgraphed.com/public/images/marvel/avengers.sv...

I did a writeup and launched a simple SDK around this back in 2014 when it launched: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/marvel-api-helper-library

Here's a fun list of JSON APIs -- https://github.com/toddmotto/public-apis

I can't seem to get back Image result for a character. I want a way to see all the different art for one character. Anyone manage to get back multiple Image results for a character?

This would have been a perfect use-case for an RDF store. But of course, the world has moved into different directions, so we get a rate-limited web-api instead.

What do you all think of their documentation? I don't have a specific reason for asking, other than that I'm a technical writer and this is a good opportunity to "pick your brains" [1] as they say...

[1] Weird phrase...

A cool use case would be if they open sourced their designs for use in prototypes - it would be super compelling to pitch an app with Iron Man or Captain America as the central user.

Python 3 wrapper I wrote: https://pypi.org/project/marvelous/

It would be interesting feed an AI to generate new heroes names and biographies.

I wonder how this compares to the info in comicvine?

this is pretty cool. look like its built with swagger-ui, so we can play around with the endpoints a little bit.

Somebody get Scott McCloud for comment

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