The subjects of the comics themselves vary. Some are statements on life and love, and some are mathematical or scientificin-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. Although known for its crudely drawn cast of oddball stick figures,[5][1] the comic occasionally features landscapes, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals, or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as during "parody week"). Occasionally realism is featured.[6][7]
The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.[8] New comics are added at midnight North American Eastern time on Monday,[1] Wednesday, and Friday, although so far they have been updated every weekday on three occasions, parody week, the five-part 'Choices' series and the '1337' series.
History
Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd
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 standalone website, where Munroe started selling t-shirts based on the comic. He currently "works on the comic full time,"[4] making xkcd a self-sufficient webcomic.
In May 2007, the comic caught the attention of many by drawing the Web in geographic form.[9] Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter.[9] This put xkcd at number two on The Post-Standard's "The new hotness" list.[10]
xkcd is not an acronym, and Munroe attaches no meaning to the name, except in a joking manner within the comic.[11] He claims that the name was originally a screen name, which he selected as a combination of letters that would be meaningless, as well as phonetically unpronounceable.[4][12]
On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered unbidden at GPS coordinates mentioned in a strip: 42.39561 -71.13051. Fans converged on a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the strip's author appeared; among his comments: "Maybe wanting something does make it real," a reference to a frame in the same strip.[13][14]
In October of 2007, a group of researchers at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the internet and said that their data presentation was inspired by an xkcd comic.[15][16][17]
Recurring themes
While there is no specific storyline to the comic, there are some recurring themes. A large number of the strips are 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 usually required to get the punchline. Romance is another subject often visited in the comic, with many strips not intended to be humorous. xkcd frequently makes reference to Munroe's "obsession" with potential raptor attacks,[18][19][20][21][22] the game Guitar Hero,[23][24]Vanilla Ice, characters making out with themselves,[25][26] various bizarre "hobbies", and many "your mom" jokes. There have also been several strips featuring "Red Spiders", zeppelins, Joss Whedon's short-lived series Firefly, Wikipedia, or Mussolini. 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.[27]
There are also many strips depicting "My Hobby", usually depicting the non-descript narrator character describing some type of humorous or quirky behavior.
[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]
Recurring characters
A man in a hat who looks like a normal stick-figure xkcd character, except for the addition of his trademark black hat (possibly in reference to black hat hackers). He is particularly intolerant of smart-assery and internet newbishness. He does not shy from pointing out the foibles in others and has at times used extreme violence in order to emphasize a point. For example, he once cut off another character's hand for posing the original "-gry" puzzle,[41] which relies on specific wording rather than logic, and once inflicted a multi-spectral "Care Bear stare" on a person who wanted him to join MySpace.[42] He is closely based on the character Aram from the Men In Hats webcomic.[43]
A boy in a barrel is another recurring character, who has appeared in 5 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 the many doodles in the older comics, but as of September, 2007, has not been seen for over a year, since comic #31.[44][45][46]
Another set of recurring characters is the nihilist and the existentialist, recognizable by their hats; the existentialist wears a beret and the nihilist wears a white top hat (or no hat at all). So far, they have only been seen together, never separately. They can first be seen in the "Nihilism" comic[47] where their conversation and actions romantically explain the similarities and differences between the two philosophies. They appear again in "Kayak",[48] "Hypotheticals"[49] and "Dignified."[50]
Munroe is often a character himself, either identified explicitly as such onscreen[51] or narrating scenes occupied by unnamed characters[52] or no on-screen characters at all.[53] As noted earlier, many of these comics portray the author as obsessed with velociraptors, although some comics convey personal stories or random musings.
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.[54] Some notable examples include:
Altering Wikipedia pages to include fictitious information from the comic, such as George Clinton having a B.A. in Mathematics, in reference to "George Clinton".[55]
WetRiffs.com from "Rule 34" (#305) was registered for fans to submit photos of people in showers with guitars.
A reader was inspired by "Dating Pools" (#314) to put up a personal on Craigslist which mathematically "proved" why someone should go out with him.[61]
Shortly after the comic "A-Minus-Minus" (#325) was posted, an eBay listing for an office chair "guaranteed to make the world a weirder place" was posted. Within hours it was bought, and the seller's feedback for the item (pictured below) echoed the strip.[62]
^The Times (June 6, 2007) xkcd.com; The click; Wednesday. Section: Features; Page 2. (writing, "Web comics have thrived and one of the best is xkcd.com. The comic strip of "romance, sarcasm, math and language" is brilliant on the stupidity of people who comment on YouTube videos and, oddly, how we take dreaming in our stride: "I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience."")
^ abc"About xkcd". Retrieved 2007-03-06. Cite error: The named reference "aboutxkcd" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
