My childhood fascination with collecting didn't include comic books. I loved early 90s baseball cards. Where superheroes came into my life was with daytime TV cartoons. Batman, X-Men, and basically anything Fox animation did for cartoons in the 90s. This means that there is a lot of information I am missing about lore, backstories, and so forth. Thankfully, Marvel has built something for their most esoteric type of fan. A person that loves superheroes and APIs.

The Marvel Comics API is incredible. You can research characters and stories and get some incredible insights such as the comic book covers. The best part is that it is so simple, even someone not super technical can play with it! It is really easy within API Fortress by logging in and using the HTTP client or opening a new tab in your browser and pasting this:

http://gateway.marvel.com:80/v1/public/characters?ts=123456&apikey={YOUR_API_KEY}&hash=2fd0f873cbd9e3939118fe9560eead1a&name=wolverine

Simply replace YOUR_API_KEY with the API key you get when you create a Marvel account and have fun exploring!

To make things even more amazing, their Interactive API Tester tool is really solid. You can play with various endpoints including character search, which provides all the information they have on everyone’s favorite fast healing Canadian. It’s a lot of fun since all it requires is a browser and an API Key. I do suggest that you get a JSON tree viewing plugin though. For Chrome, I use this JSONView.

Try it out for yourself. Much like a Youtube blackhole, hours will disappear before you realize it.

Patrick Poulin is the CEO of API Fortress. An API testing and monitoring suite as a platform. He still hasn't seen the latest Avengers, so please don't judge him.