xkcd (sometimes styled XKCD) is a serial webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. 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 acronym but "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation".
The subject matter of the comic varies from statements on life and love to mathematical, programming, and scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. It has a cast of stick figures, and the comic occasionally features landscapes, graphs, charts, and intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals. New cartoons are added on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays every week, with few exceptions.
Munroe has released six spinoff books from the comic. The first book, published in 2010 and titled xkcd: volume 0, was a series of selected comics from his website. 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 way that is scientifically grounded. 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. A fourth book, How To, which is described as "a profoundly unhelpful self-help book", was released on September 3, 2019. A fifth book, What If? 2, was released on September 13, 2022. A revised edition of What If?, titled What If? 10th Anniversary Edition, was released on November 26, 2024.
On August 31, 2023, a spinoff YouTube channel named xkcd's What If? was created, dedicated to adapting the What If? books into video format, narrated by Munroe and produced by Neptune Studios LLC. It started posting videos on November 29, 2023.
History
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 college, Munroe's "piles of notebooks" became too large and he started scanning the images he thought were "funny or pretty".
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 thousands of T-shirts per month. Munroe recalled that the comic's success was so great he decided to leave NASA.
On September 19, 2012, "Click and Drag" was published, which featured a panel which can be explored via clicking and dragging its contents. It immediately triggered positive response on social websites and forums. The large image nested in the panel measures 165,888 pixels wide by 79,872 pixels high. Munroe later described it as "probably the most popular one I ever put on the Internet" and considered it one of 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 title 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 for Best Graphic Story.
Around 2007, Munroe drew all the comics on paper, then scanned and processed them on a tablet computer (a Fujitsu Lifebook). In 2014, he was using a Cintiq graphics tablet for drawing (like many other cartoonists), alongside a laptop for coding tasks.
Influences
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, xkcds quirky and technical humor would have been difficult to syndicate. 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
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, Linux, 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.Other comics related to Wikipedia include: 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 outlets. Another strip depicted an example of a topic that Wikipedia could not cover neutrally—a fictional donation to either anti-abortion or abortion-rights activists, determined by the word count in a Wikipedia article on the event where the donation was announced being either odd or even. Wikipedia is also depicted as an extension of one's mind, allowing them to access far more information than normally. Another comic depicted the [citation needed] feature of Wikipedia.Nearly all xkcd strips have a tooltip when hovering over the comic, known as a title text. It usually contains an addition or expansion of the joke in the main comic, or an explanation of the joke in very early comics.
One of the few recurring characters is a man wearing a flat black hat, apparently based on Aram, from the webcomic Men in Hats. He has dedicated his life to causing confusion and harm to others just for his own entertainment. He is commonly referred to as "Black Hat" or "Black Hat Guy" in the community. He gained a girlfriend, commonly named "Danish" by the community and just as cruel as he is, during the course of a small series called "Journal".
Another recurring character is a man with a beret, sometimes simply referred to as "Beret Guy". He seems to be naïve, optimistic, obsessed with bakeries, and completely out of touch with reality. He also has magical abilities, which often manifest in the creation of situations or objects that support his overly optimistic worldview, even when in direct violation of societal norms or the laws of physics; an example is his startup making incredible amounts of money despite his not even knowing what it does. In one instance, he hired Lin-Manuel Miranda as an engineer, and in another instance, sprouted literal "endless wings".
Geographical maps, including their various different formats and creation methods, are a frequently recurring theme in the comic.* On occasion these maps have been mentioned by analysts due to their imaginative or original presentation of figures or statistics. In the comic "2016 Election Map", colored stick figures are used to display how people voted in the 2016 United States presidential election according to their region. It was praised as being a strong visualization tool for the election outcome.
Inspired activities
On several occasions, fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out the subject of a particular drawing or sketch offline. 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.
When animated xkcd strip "Time" won a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story 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. 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's Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the Internet and presented their data using a Hilbert curve, which they stated 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 secure passwords following the guidelines of the same comic. The Python Standard Library module "antigravity", when run, opens the xkcd comic "Python". On June 4, 2009, a function was added into the "antigravity" module that implements the geohashing algorithm (which is inspired by the 426th xkcd comic, also titled "Geohashing"), according to the commit history of CPython's git repository. 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, Cory Doctorow, Hank Green, and others. This reenactment was posted to YouTube with the title "We Love xkcd".