xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." It has been recognized in such mainstream media as The Guardian and The New York Times.

The subject matter of the comic varies, including statements on life and love (some love strips are simply art with poetry), and mathematical or scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. Although it has a cast of stick figures, the comic occasionally features landscapes, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals (for example, strip #17 "What If" shows an Apollonian gasket), or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as during "Parody Week").

The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. New comics are added three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; although, on six occasions so far, they have been updated every weekday: Parody Week, the "Choices" series, the "1337" series, the "Secretary" series, the "The Race" series, and Guest Comic Week.

History

The comic began in September 2005 when Munroe decided to scan doodles from his school notebooks and put them on his webpage. Eventually the comic was changed into a stand-alone website, where Munroe started selling T-shirts based on the comic. He currently "works on the comic full time," making Munroe one of the few professional webcomic artists. 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." The name of the comic is spelled in all lowercase letters, or all capitals.

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.

On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at Reverend Thomas J. Williams park , in North Cambridge, Massachusetts whose coordinates were mentioned in a strip, #240. Munroe appeared, commenting, "Maybe wanting something does make it real," reversing the conclusion he drew in the last frame of the same strip.

In October 2008, The New Yorker magazine online published an interview and "Cartoon Off" between Randall Munroe and Farley Katz. For the "Cartoon-Off," Katz and Munroe each drew: "the Internet, as envisioned by the elderly", "String Theory", "1999", and "your favorite animal eating your favorite food".

In March, 2010, a puzzle hidden inside of the collection xkcd: Volume 0 was cracked by many members of the xkcd forums. The solution was "<3<3<3 2010-06-26 14:28:57 ." The first six characters were hearts, followed by a date, time, and coordinates. (June 26, 2010, 2:28:57 PM at Golden Gate Park, specifically at the coordinates specified by Google Earth if you search for Golden Gate Park.) At the appropriate time and date, Randall again met with fans and handed out 255 limited edition prints of xkcd: Volume 0, titled xkcd: Volume 0 Service Pack 1.

Recurring items

While there is no specific storyline to the comic, there are some recurring themes and characters, many of which are touched on in an xkcd parody of the Discovery Channel's I Love the World commercial.

Themes

A large number of the strips contain mathematics or computer science jokes. These jokes often feature university-level subjects, although many are written in such a way that a clear understanding of the subject is not required to get the punch line. Romance is another subject often visited in the comic, with many strips not intended to be humorous; Munroe is a self-declared fan of Kurt Halsey's bleak romances.

There are also many strips opening with "My Hobby:" and usually depicting the nondescript narrator character describing some type of humorous or quirky behavior often involving language games.

References to Wikipedia articles or to Wikipedia as a whole have occurred in xkcd. For example, a facsimile of a made-up Wikipedia entry for "Malamanteau" (a stunt word created by Munroe to poke fun at Wikipedia's writing style) appeared, provoking a controversy within Wikipedia that was picked up by various media. xkcd also frequently makes reference to Munroe's "obsession" with potential raptor attacks, and has used many "your mom" jokes. Multiple earlier strips featured "Red Spiders" and others that reference Joss Whedon's science fiction series Firefly.

Each comic also has a tooltip, specified using the title attribute in HTML. The text usually contains an afterthought or annotation related to that day's comic.

Characters

Although Munroe does not maintain a list of characters on his web site, some recurring characters can be identified by their visual features (for example, hats) and mannerisms.

A man who looks like a normal stick-figure xkcd character, but for the addition of a black hat. The man's hat is a reference to Aram from the now-defunct webcomic Men in Hats, not to black hat hackers as is often supposed. This character first appeared in the comic "Poisson" (the twelfth comic published on the website). The character refers to himself as a "Classhole" (a portmanteau of "classy" and "asshole"). He does not shy from pointing out the failures of others and has at times used extreme violence in order to emphasize a point. In the January 30, 2008 comic, his hat was taken by a woman, though he later retrieved his hat by stealing a submarine and using it to crash through the ice where she was skating. The latest appearance of the two together was comic #804. The character is one of the most frequently occurring in the comic, though he remains unnamed (he was referred to in multiple comics as "hat guy"). In the "Secretary" story arc, he is nominated for the post of Secretary of the Internet when the Internet has started to collapse, but after a variety of hijinks involving Ron Paul, Cory Doctorow, and the Auto-Troll Shuffle (described as him taking a whole car apart and placing the parts on random cars within the same parking lot), is sentenced to death, escaping by filling the Capitol rotunda with plastic ball pit-style balls, which distracts the pursuers, while he flees on Doctorow's hot-air balloon. The most common recurring female "character" is known as Megan in several strips; she was first referred to by name in comic #159 – "Boombox", and again several times afterward. She is recognized by her short, dark hair. A boy in a barrel appeared in five early strips. Unlike most other characters, he is not a stick figure. He was repeatedly seen inside a barrel, floating in a large body of water. The boy in the barrel was one of many doodles in the older comics, but has not been seen since comic #31, in which he flew away with a ferret wearing a toy airplane. Another set of recurring characters is the nihilist and the beret-wearing existentialist. Until comic #291, they had only been seen together, never separately. They are first seen in the "Nihilism" comic, and again in "Kayak," "Hypotheticals", and "Dark Flow." Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing and scientific community sometimes appear, such as free software advocates Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow, and physicist Richard Feynman. Other celebrities such as actress Summer Glau also appear in xkcd. Gary Gygax makes an appearance in the comic "Ultimate Game" Mrs. Roberts was a main character in the "1337" series, and has appeared in other comics along with her children, Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- aka "Little Bobby Tables" (a reference to SQL injection), and Elaine Roberts (although her first name is really "Help I'm trapped in a drivers license factory"), the protagonist of the "1337" series. Firefly character River Tam—and actress Summer Glau, who played her—has appeared in a few comics, usually in a dream sequence where a character in the strip makes reference to her. Other Firefly cast members, such as Nathan Fillion, have appeared in the series and many turn out to have similar personalities to their Firefly characters.

Inspired activities

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 examples include: Richard Stallman was sent a katana and was confronted by students dressed as ninjas before speaking at the Yale Political Union—inspired by "Open Source". When Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon – inspired by "Blagofaire". xkcd readers sneaking chess boards onto roller coasters – inspired by "Chess Photo"

A subgroup of "geohashing" xkcd readers has emerged, members of which travel to random nearby latitude/longitude locations calculated by the geohashing 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. YouTube has placed a feature on comments that plays back the comment aloud on "Audio Preview", possibly based on the strip "Listen to Yourself". Running the following code is an easter egg in Python 3.0: import antigravity, inspired by the strip "Python". The module also contains a geohashing function.

In the xkcd cartoon "Troll Slayer" (591), 4chan's /b/ boards are taken over by Twilight lovers. In response to this, /b/ was temporarily renamed "Twilight Appreciation Station", and included the text "We have met the enemy and he is us", which appears in the cartoon as a note added by Randall Munroe. In order to prevent /b/ from trolling the xkcd forums, registration was blocked for several days after the comic appeared.

GNU Emacs 23.1 introduced M-x butterfly easter egg, in response to "Real Programmers". RepRap/Makerbot operator Allan Ecker was inspired by xkcd "Infrastructures" to actually design a tiny open source violin, available on Thingiverse.

Based on Packages, programmers set up programs to automatically find an item for sale on the Internet for $1.00 every day.

AAISP has implemented the code word "shibboleet" in their call centres in reference to the comic #806. Comic #305, Rule 34, has the characters commenting on the lack of pornography featuring women in the shower playing electric guitar. Randall Munroe subsequently created the website WetRiffs.com, which hosts submitted pictures of men and women in showers playing guitars.

Awards and recognition

xkcd has been recognized at the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards. In the 2008 Awards, it was nominated for "Outstanding Use of the Medium," "Outstanding Short Form Comic," and "Outstanding Comedic Comic," and won "Outstanding Single Panel Comic." xkcd was also voted Best Comic Strip by readers in the 2007 Weblog Awards and 2008 Weblog Awards. It was also nominated for a 2009 NewNowNext Award in the category 'OMFG Internet Award'. Randall Munroe has been nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist.

Translations

xkcd comics have been translated into a number of languages. A community of readers have translated every comic into French and nearly half of the comics have been translated into Russian. One reader has translated many of the comics into Spanish; translations exist for comics that, according to the translator, can be translated without losing their humor. Various xkcd comics have also been translated into German, Finnish, Czech, and Portuguese.

Book

In 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, 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 has 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 Laos.

References

Further reading

External links

"What I learned from the xkcd effect" An article on the impact of xkcd topics on Google searches.

Category:2000s webcomics Category:2010s webcomics Category:Comedy webcomics Category:Creative Commons-licensed comics Category:Hacking (programmer subculture) Category:Web Cartoonists' Choice Award winners Category:Webcomics in print Category:American webcomics

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