xkcd

Well-known comic in which the English-language Wikipedia and the template used there {{Citation needed}}(" receipt required") are parodied

xkcd is a webcomic by Randall Munroe . The author overwrites his comics with "Webcomic about love , sarcasm , math and language " (English: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language ).

content

The themes of the comics are different. Some deal with love or everyday life, others (such as math and inside jokes ) require specialist knowledge. There are also some running gags , such as the exaggerated fear of velociraptors . In addition to the geek and computer scientist audience (similar to that of User Friendly and Slashdot ), the comics are also aimed at natural scientists and linguists . Due to the complexity of the content and the necessary specialist knowledge, Internet pages were created specifically for the purpose of explaining xkcd.

The webcomic is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license . Exceptions are individual strips that have been released by Munroe under licenses without the "NonCommercial" restriction, e.g. B. to be usable in Wikipedia . New comics appear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and occasionally on special occasions.

Since the beginning of July 2012 There is also the offshoot what if? which is more of a mixture of articles and comics and with new episodes appearing irregularly. In it, the author tries to provide answers to unusual theoretical questions sent in by readers in the humorous and at the same time scientifically accurate way that is typical for xkcd. In contrast to the comic itself, this offshoot is not under a Creative Commons license. The episodes each also contain several comic strips. 156 of them had appeared online by September 2017.

history

Randall Munroe (2007)

The first strips of the webcomic appeared on September 30, 2005, when Munroe posted sketches from his school notebooks online. The name xkcd was not intended as an acronym , but as a meaningless combination of letters. In the following two years xkcd became more and more popular, with some comics reaching a level of awareness that exceeded the usual number of visitors.

In 2009, the book was xkcd: volume 0 in profit Breadpig - Verlag published. Many of the comics that have already been published on the web are reproduced in a slightly revised version and provided with comments.

At the beginning of 2012, xkcd reached the milestone of 1000 published webcomics. Comic number 1500 was published on March 18, 2015. The milestone of comics published in 2000 was reached in mid-2018.

Drawing style

Last panel of an xkcd comic about philosophy

The style of xkcd is pretty simple. The people are shown as stick figures , their surroundings are also drawn with lines. Colors or lavishly drawn landscapes are only used occasionally.

Many comics consist of function graphs that are annotated with handwriting and have characteristic, wavy lines. Users and communities of some programming languages made this style for the plotting of function graphs to the so-called "xkcd" style. So this drawing style is z. B. implemented for Python in the Matplotlib library from version 1.3.0; Scripts for such character styles have also been developed for Mathematica , R and TeX . Some comics move, are interactive, are updated frequently, can be explored, or tell an ongoing story.

If you hold the mouse pointer over the respective comic, a tooltip appears that gives the joke a second punchline .

Translations into other languages

Xkcd comics are also translated into other languages. Selected comics are available in French , Russian , Spanish , German , Finnish , Czech, and Portuguese .

Implementation in the real world

Fans have repeatedly transferred fictional webcomics to reality. According to the scene from xkcd no. 225 Richard Stallman was sent a katana and Stallman was surrounded by students disguised as ninjas during a lecture .

Randall Munroe compiles some of these reactions on his own pages, such as when some fans smuggled chessboards onto roller coasters due to the comic strip "Chess Photo" and sent him a photo of it. The reactions to " Rule 34 ", in which people played guitar in the shower, were collected under the domain wetriffs.com mentioned there.

The webcomic "Geohashing" led to the project of the same name, Geohashing , whose participants visit specifically defined, randomly calculated points for a day with the help of GPS devices. The participants in this global game organize themselves in the mostly English-language geohashing wiki and report there on their successful or unsuccessful attempts to reach the respective geohash points of the day. The most active participants are in the US, Germany and the UK.

Richard Stallman is surrounded by " ninjas "; based on the comic "Open Source"
"Wikipedian Protester"
“Wikipedian Protester” in Cambridge
“Wikipedian Protester” in Washington
Cory Doctorow disguised as a blogger at eTech 2007; based on the comic "Blagofaire"