XKCD Launches

2005

Date: September 2005 · Place: xkcd.com, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Figures: Randall Munroe, NASA contractor turned cartoonist · Tags: Webcomic, Geek, Stick 01. A NASA Contractor's Sketchbook Randall Munroe is working as a robotics contractor at NASA Langley when he starts posting sketchbook pages on a personal site in September 2005. The format settles fast: black-ink stick figures, no recurring characters, captions about programming, mathematics, romance, and dread. He calls the site xkcd because the four-letter combination was unclaimed. Munroe quits NASA in 2006 to draw full time. The strip is updated Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He never misses. 02. The Geek Lingua Franca XKCD becomes the comic that engineers, scientists, and grad students forward to each other to mean I see you. Strips like Sandwich, Map of the Internet, Compiling, and Standards enter Slack channels and lecture-hall slides as shorthand. The hover-text adds a second joke for the obsessive reader. Munroe builds a book empire on the back of the strip, then a column for IFLScience, then What If, then a New York Times bestseller list. XKCD is the proof that a free webcomic with no merch can sustain a single cartoonist for two decades without selling out. Sources • xkcd.com archive, comics 1-50 • The New Yorker, 'XKCD's Randall Munroe' (April 2014) • KnowYourMeme, XKCD