xkcd

xkcd
Panel from "Philosophy"
Author(s)	Randall Munroe
Website	xkcd.com
Current status / schedule	Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
Launch date	September 2005 (2005-09)
Genre(s)	Geek humor

xkcd, sometimes styled XKCD, is a webcomic created by American author Randall Munroe that is popular among many science and technology-based subcultures. The comic's tagline describes it as "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Munroe states on the comic's website that the name of the comic is not an initialism but "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation". The comic caters to people with above-average intelligence and has a politically progressive perspective, which is said to make it popular with so-called hipsters frequenting online communities such as Reddit, where the strips are often quoted in the comment sections.

The subject matter of the comic varies from mathematical, programming, and cutting-edge (albeit non-controversial and generally politically correct) scientific in-jokes to statements on life and love. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. Although it has a cast of stick figures, the comic occasionally features landscapes and intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals, graphs, and charts. New cartoons are added three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Munroe has come out in favor of many progressive political concepts like the most severe global warming interpretations, and against new but culturally controversial research fields like human biodiversity, which he rejected out of hand, preferring to believe that human intelligence is not biological but culturally determined. Most of his math and logic-themed strips are widely praised for their insights and original approach, however.

Munroe has released two spinoff books from the comic. His 2014 book What If? is based on his blog of the same name that answers unusual science questions from readers in a light-hearted but scientifically grounded way. The What If column on the site is updated with new articles from time to time. His 2015 book Thing Explainer explains scientific concepts using only the one thousand most commonly used words in English.

History

File:XkcdMunroe.jpg

Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd

As a student, Munroe often drew charts, maps, and "stick figure battles" in the margins of his school notebooks, besides solving mathematical problems unrelated to his classes. By the time he graduated from university, Munroe's "piles of notebooks" became too large and he started scanning the images.

xkcd began in September 2005, when Munroe decided to scan his doodles and put them on his personal website. According to Munroe, the comic's name has no particular significance and is simply a four-letter word without a phonetic pronunciation, something he describes as "a treasured and carefully guarded point in the space of four-character strings." In January 2006, the comic was split off into its own website, created in collaboration with Derek Radtke.

In May 2007, the comic garnered widespread attention by depicting online communities in geographic form. Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter. This put xkcd at number two on the Syracuse Post-Standard's "The new hotness" list. By 2008, xkcd was able to financially support Munroe and Radtke "reasonably well" through the sale of multiple thousand T-shirts per month.

On September 19, 2012, "Click and Drag" was published, which featured a panel which can be explored via clicking and dragging its insides. It immediately triggered positive response on social websites and forums. The large image nested in the panel measures 165,888 pixels wide by 79,822 pixels high. Munroe later described it as "probably the most popular one I ever put on the Internet", as well as placing it among his own favorites.

"Time" began publication at midnight EDT on March 25, 2013, with the comic's image updating every 30 minutes until March 30, when they began to change every hour, lasting for over four months. The images constitute time lapse frames of a story, with the mouseover text originally reading "Wait for it.", later changed to "RUN." and changed again to "The end." on July 26. The story began with a male and female character building a sandcastle complex on a beach who then embark on an adventure to learn the secrets of the sea. On July 26, the comic superimposed a frame (3094) with the phrase "The End". Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club wrote of the comic: "[...] the kind of nifty experiment that keeps people coming back to XKCD, which at its best isn't a strip comic so much as an idea factory and a shared experience". Cory Doctorow mentioned "Time" in a brief article on Boing Boing on April 7, saying the comic was "coming along nicely". The 3,099-panel "Time" comic ended on July 26, 2013, and was followed by a blog post summarizing the journey. In 2014, it won the Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story category.

Around 2007, Munroe drew all the comics on paper, then scanned and processed them on a tablet computer (a Fujitsu Lifebook). As of 2014, he was using a Cintiq graphics tablet for drawing (like many other cartoonists), alongside a laptop for coding tasks.

Influences

"Wikipedian Protester", with mouseover text "SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION"

Munroe has been a fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, describing xkcd as an "heir" to Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. Despite this influence, xkcd's quirky and technical humor would have been difficult to syndicate in newspapers. In webcomics, Munroe has said that "one can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have." Munroe cited the lack of a need for editorial control due to the low bar of access to the Internet as "a salvation."

Recurring themes

File:Malamanteau.png

"Malamanteau", with mouseover text "The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490s and the other twenty-two are arguments on Language Log."

While there is no specific storyline to the webcomic, there are some recurring themes and characters. Recurring themes of xkcd include "technology, science, mathematics and relationships." xkcd frequently features jokes related to popular culture, such as Guitar Hero, Facebook, Vanilla Ice, and Wikipedia.

There are many strips opening with the words "My Hobby:", usually depicting the nondescript narrator character describing some type of humorous or quirky behavior. However, not all strips are intended to be humorous. Romance and relationships are frequent themes, and other xkcd strips consist of complex depictions of landscapes. Many xkcd strips refer to Munroe's "obsession" with potential velociraptor attacks.

References to Wikipedia articles or to Wikipedia as a whole have occurred several times in xkcd. A facsimile of a made-up Wikipedia entry for "malamanteau" (a stunt word created by Munroe to poke fun at Wikipedia's writing style) provoked a controversy within Wikipedia that was picked up by various media. Another "Hobby" strip said that a donation between pro-life and pro-choice activists could be chosen by the word count in a Wikipedia article, which would probably cause huge controversy and the site to possibly crash.

Almost all xkcd strips have a tooltip (specified using the title attribute in HTML), the text of which usually contains a secondary punchline or annotation related to that day's comic.

One of the only recurring characters is a man wearing a flat black hat. He is extremely sociopathic, and has dedicated his life to causing confusion and harm to others just for his own entertainment. He has no name, so most characters just call him "Black Hat". He gained a girlfriend, commonly named "Danish" by the community, during the course of a small series called "Journal" who is just as cruel as he is.

One of the few other recurring characters is a man with a beret, sometimes, simply referred to as "Beret Guy." He seems to be naive, obsessed with bakeries, optimistic, and completely out of touch with reality. He runs a startup that makes incredible amounts of money, despite him not even knowing what they do. In one instance, he hired Lin-Manuel Miranda as an accountant and, in another instance, sprouted literal "endless wings."

Inspired activities

Hoax attack on Richard Stallman by students dressed as ninjas.
Inspired by "Open Source"

On several occasions, fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out, in real life, the subject of a particular drawing or sketch. Some notable examples include:

• Richard Stallman was confronted by students dressed as ninjas before speaking at the Yale Political Union – inspired by "Open Source".
• On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park, , in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose coordinates were mentioned in "Dream Girl". Munroe appeared, commenting, "Maybe wanting something does make it real", reversing the conclusion he drew in the last frame of the same strip. This park is recognized by NASA's Spot The Station program, which provides information on viewing opportunities for the International Space Station.
• When xkcd strip "Time" won a Hugo award in the "Best Graphic Story" category in August 2014, it was accepted by Cory Doctorow on behalf of Munroe, dressing as Munroe had drawn him in an earlier strip, "1337: Part 5".
• xkcd readers began sneaking chess boards onto roller coasters after "Chess Photo" was published. – inspired by "Chess Photo".
• The game of "geohashing" has gained more than 1,000 players, who travel to random coordinates calculated by the algorithm described in "Geohashing".
• In October 2007, a group of researchers at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the Internet and presented their data using a Hilbert curve, which they claimed was inspired by an xkcd comic that used a similar technique. Inspired by the same comic, the Carna Botnet used a Hilbert curve to present data in their 2012 Internet Census.
• Based on "Packages", programmers have set up programs to automatically find an item for sale on the Internet for $1.00 every day.
• In response to "Password Strength", Dropbox shows two messages reading "lol" and "Whoa there, don't take advice from a webcomic too literally ;)" when attempting to register with the password "correcthorsebatterystaple". ArenaNet recommended that Guild Wars 2 users create passwords following the guidelines of the same comic. The website https://howsecureismypassword.net/ says one's password would be cracked 'Instantly' if 'correcthorsebatterystaple' is entered.
• Inspired by the xkcd comic "Online Communities 2", Slovak artist Martin Vargic created the "Map of the Internet 1.0."
• In 2008, Munroe posted a parody of the Discovery Channel's I Love the World advertising campaign on xkcd, which was later reenacted by Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, and Cory Doctorow.

Awards and recognition

Cory Doctorow wearing a red cape and a pair of goggles based on his appearance in xkcd. Doctorow later wore the costume again while accepting a Hugo Award on Munroe's behalf.

xkcd has been recognized at various award ceremonies. In the 2008 Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards, the webcomic was nominated for "Outstanding Use of the Medium", "Outstanding Short Form Comic", and "Outstanding Comedic Comic", and won "Outstanding Single Panel Comic". xkcd was voted "Best Comic Strip" by readers in the 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards The webcomic was nominated for a 2009 NewNowNext Award in the category "OMFG Internet Award". Randall Munroe was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist in both 2011 and 2012, and he won a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2014, for "Time".

Books

On September 2009, Munroe released a book, entitled xkcd: volume 0, containing selected xkcd comics. The book was published by breadpig, under a Creative Commons license, CC BY-NC 3.0, with all of the publisher's profits donated to Room to Read to promote literacy and education in the developing world. Six months after release, the book had sold over 25,000 copies. The book tour in New York City and Silicon Valley was a fundraiser for Room to Read that raised $32,000 to build a school in Salavan Province, Laos.

On October 2012, xkcd: volume 0 was included in the Humble Bundle eBook Bundle. It was available for download only to those who donated higher than the average donated for the other eBooks. The book was released DRM-free, in two different-quality PDF files.

On March 12, 2014, Munroe announced the book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. The book was released on September 2, 2014. The book expands on the What If? blog on the xkcd website. On May 13, 2015, Munroe announced a new book titled Thing Explainer. Eventually released on November 24, 2015, Thing Explainer is based on the xkcd strip "Up Goer Five" and only uses the thousand most commonly used words to explain different scientific devices.

References

Primary sources

In the text these references are preceded by a double dagger (‡):

Further reading

• An article on the impact of xkcd topics on Google searches.

External links

• xkcd What-If
• Explain xkcd, a wiki dedicated to explaining the references found in each comic