Xkcd

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 2010¹ 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.…

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.

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, xkcd s 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". 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 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 [ citat ion needed] feature of Wikipedia. [[File:Webcomic xkcd - Wikipedian protester.png|thumb|alt=xkcd comic "Wikipedian Protestor": as a politician addresses a crowd, a protestor within the crowd holds up a sign reading "[CITATION NEEDED]".|"Wikipedian Protester", with title text "SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION" ]]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.

See also

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) – A webcomic in a somewhat similar vein

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378435333 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.