Xkcd

Introduction to XKCD

XKCD is an American English webcomic located at xkcd.com. The website, comic and affiliated products and fora are all by Randall Munroe, who describes the website as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." (2) and as described by Dresden Codak, a fellow webcomic artist, XKCD is "simplicity itself, this comic is lined paper, stick figures and math jokes resembling the margins of a high school math exam but with fewer misspelled Nirvana lyrics and crude drawings of genitalia." (1). The range of jokes that the comic strips touch upon is immensely diverse and polymathic, and is hence aimed at a (largely very educated) "deep geek" audience (3); the comic material of the strips is often so involved that it can be necessary to have Wikipedia on hand while reading XKCD to fully "get" the humor that the strips employ (3). Sometimes the comics are not jokes at all, simply art or some commentary on life, in particular or in abstract (3). The artistic style of the comics is largely minimalist, but in the occasional strip Munroe artistically digresses, adding copious detail. New strips are introduced on the front page of the site on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at or around midnight (4). The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License (5).

Creation and History:

XKCD began in September of 2005 when Randall Munroe found some of his doodles from high school and decided to scan them and put them on his personal website (8), whose name was XKCD because that was Munroe's favorite internet handle at the time (the username by which he most commonly referred to himself) (2). He originally chose the name as his I.M. screen name, because, as Monroe details: "I wanted to pick a name that I wouldn't get tired of. That would just always mean me. So I just went down combinations of letters that weren't taken, until I could find one that didn't have any meaning, didn't have any pronunciation, and didn't seem like an obvious acronymn for anything." (8).

Munroe, a twenty-seven-year-old physics major, programmer, and former NASA contractor (6), now makes his living entirely off of XKCD (7), selling thousands of XKCD t-shirts a month (6). The site has become wildly popular among techies internationally (9), and enjoys such fame that it is commonly parodied and imitated, to such an extent that there is a website dedicated entirely to deprecating Munroe's efforts (10). Given its audience and rocket growth, "there really shouldn't be any doubt that xkcd is a rock star in comics." (11). The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day and 80 million page views per month (6).

What XKCD Means For Webcomics Everywhere:

Regarding putting your comic on the internet the Internet, Munroe has said, “You 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.” (8). Munroe has become something of a cult hero in geek culture. He counts himself as among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at it (6), among a pool of at least 19,100 comics available online (7). Some consequences of his cult status are seeing his ideas, first presented in his comic, actualized in the real world (12); addressing this, he says "I keep being surprised seeing the ideas in the comic leak out into real life. It’s tempting to just write a comic called “EVERYONE MAIL RANDALL MUNROE TWENTY BUCKS”—maybe it would work, and I could just close down the XKCD store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life."

Regarding monetizing your webcomic and making it commercially successful, Haplog, a website that pulls together a bunch of different publicly available data about a website and then estimates its "worth," estimates in "webcomic-land range" that the most commercially valuable webcomic in the world may be XKCD, which gets a $1.7 million score, followed by Penny Arcade at $669,725 and Questionable Content comes in at around $480,000. This puts XKCD in the strange position of being a template for the successful webcomic, while Munroe's work is often characterized as countercultural in tenor (6). This suggests that what is countercultural in physical comics may be mainstream in webcomics, and vice-versa.

XKCD is also responsible for the popularization of alt-text jokes in webcomics, which are jokes in the text that shows up as a tooltip when you hover the mouse cursor over an image (13).

"Characters in XKCD "

Though XKCD does not precisely have a cast, there are several recurring recognizable characters with distinct social and behavioral tendencies that the various strips riff on. In order of appearance, these characters can be identified as follows:

A male stick-figure who wears a colored-in hat and is otherwise nondescript, is the most commonly-seen distinctive character on XKCD. The man's hat references Aram ex the no-longer-active webcomic "Men in Hats" (14). "Hat Man"'s first appeared in the comic "Poisson" (the twelfth comic on XKCD) (2). The character refers to himself as a "Classhole" (a portmanteau of "classy" and "asshole") (2). His behavior is sociopathic and pointed, usually with the intent to amuse himself or place emphasis on one of his personal philosophies. Though referred to as "hat guy" occasionally (2), this character has no explicit name.

1: "Webcomics for any taste -- and free." Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia). (November 22, 2008 Saturday ): 272 words. LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

2: xkcd.com. Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

3: Winkler, D. (2008, Xkcd. Broken Pencil, , 56-56. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/213098915?accountid=14667; http://mgetit.lib.umich.edu/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ%3Aaltpresswatch&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=unknown&rft.jtitle=Broken+Pencil&rft.atitle=xkcd&rft.au=Winkler%2C+Derek&rft.aulast=Winkler&rft.aufirst=Derek&rft.date=2008-07-01&rft.volume=&rft.issue=40&rft.spage=56&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=Broken+Pencil&rft.issn=12018996 Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

4: XKCD: a perfect marriage of snark and skepticism. (2012, September-October). Skeptical Inquirer, 36(5), 44. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA301180943&v=2.1&u=lom_umichanna&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

5: http://xkcd.com/license.html Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

6: Cohen, N. This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix. Published: May 26, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss. Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

7: Altmeyer, E. (2012, Jan 17). Online comics: A new frontier for the common artist. Pittsburgh Post - Gazette. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/916325037?accountid=14667; http://mgetit.lib.umich.edu/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ%3Anewsstand&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=unknown&rft.jtitle=Pittsburgh+Post+-+Gazette&rft.atitle=ONLINE+COMICS%3A+A+NEW+FRONTIER+FOR+THE+COMMON+ARTIST&rft.au=Altmeyer%2C+Emma&rft.aulast=Altmeyer&rft.aufirst=Emma&rft.date=2012-01-17&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=C.7&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=Pittsburgh+Post+-+Gazette&rft.issn=1068624X Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

8: Fernandez, Rebecca (2006-10-12). "xkcd: A comic strip for the computer geek". Red Hat Magazine (Raleigh, North Carolina: Red Hat). Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.

9: COHEN, N. (2009, Apr 20). When pixels find new life on real paper. New York Times (1923-Current File). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1030660022?accountid=14667; http://mgetit.lib.umich.edu/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ%3Ahnpnewyorktimes&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.jtitle=New+York+Times+%281923-Current+file%29&rft.atitle=When+Pixels+Find+New+Life+On+Real+Paper&rft.au=Cohen%2C+Noam&rft.aulast=Cohen&rft.aufirst=Noam&rft.date=2009-04-20&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=B3&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=New+York+Times+%281923-Current+file%29&rft.issn=03624331

10: http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/

11: http://comixtalk.com/creators/scott_kurtz?page=11

12: Katz, Farley (October 15, 2008). "Cartoon-Off: XKCD". The New Yorker. Retrieved January 17, 2009

13: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AltText

14: Zelinsky, Joshua (March 4, 2008). "Randall Munroe, writer of xkcd, talks about the comic, politics and the internet" (Interview). Wikinews. Date Accessed: 2012/10/12.