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Xkcd

Serial webcomic by Randall Munroe

  • 12 min read
  • 7 chapters

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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.

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Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Xkcd” (this version, 2026-10-04) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.