‘xkcd’ Comes Home
to CNU A
one-one-one chat with comic creator Randall Munroe reveals the inspiration
behind his
success. Humorist Randall Munroe (’06) has made a name for himself as a Web
comic. He’s modest and speaks in digressions
reminiscent of a David Foster Wallace novel; ideas spring from each other in a tangential feedback
loop. His comic, “xkcd” is widely read online, worn on T-shirts and hung on posters in countless
dorm rooms and office cubicles worldwide. A stick-figure comic, “xkcd” explores computer science,
technology, mathematics, science, language, pop culture and romance. A string of
characters that “doesn’t mean anything,” according to Munroe, the letters xkcd
even resemble the stick figures
so often depicted in the comics. Not for everyone, a disclaimer on xkcd.com reads “Warning: this comic
occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may
be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for
liberal-arts majors).” Not content to work only
in comedy, Munroe also undertakes serious projects via “xkcd,” covering vast distances (sometimes
literally) in scale drawings of the relative depths of lakes and oceans, the
sizes of online communities
rendered as landmasses of an imaginary world, and a chart showing how (almost)
all the money in the world is
allocated. Munroe has earned mention
in both The Guardian and The New York Times. In 2011 he was
runner-up for the Hugo Award for
Best Fan Artist, given annually by the World Science Fiction Convention for the best contributions to the
genre. He has presented at MIT, Dartmouth and at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. He
returned to CNU in April for a talk about April Fools’ jokes, flying invisible
kites on the Great Lawn and
turning his apartment into a ball pit after “xkcd” turned profitable. Voyages
caught up with him before he went
onstage. How did
you get started drawing “xkcd”? How did
you come up with the name? Who are
some of your influences in your drawing, humor and subject matter? “xkcd” is at a crossroads of art and science, which is not a
typical mode for most people. In looking at the comics, there’s real artistic ability there,
like when you draw a chair or something in the
background, but the people are always faceless stick figures. Is that a
conscious choice; is there a
statement there? There are a lot of humor sites on the Internet. How do you keep “xkcd”
relevant for your audience? What’s a typical workday at “xkcd” like? You
worked at NASA after you graduated from CNU. What did you do there? At what time did you think you might be able to make a living
doing “xkcd”? On your
website you list the Pleiades as your favorite astronomical body. Why? Munroe
graduated from Christopher Newport
University with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2006. He lives in
Boston with his wife. — Brian McGuire
— Brian McGuire
It was totally by accident. I had a bunch of notebooks,
and I would always doodle in the corner of homework and stuff. Eventually I started to put more time into [the
drawings] than I would into the work, so I was like, ‘OK, I need to do these in separate notebooks. The homework I don’t
really want to keep, but the drawings I want to keep.’ Those notebooks started getting old and falling apart and
there were a couple of these drawings I kind of liked so I put them online on a Web page I wasn’t doing anything
with. A lot of the early comics I drew were drawn in various lectures in Gosnold Hall. There was this little
research center in old McMurran that had a couple computers with scanners so I would go in there with these notebooks
and scan them and email them to myself and then cut them up into comics and post them. I graduated and got a
job, but the people reading my comics started buying Tshirts [printed with “xkcd”
images], and that became my job.
I actually came up with the name in late ’90s. We got on
AOL when I was really young. As I got older what I was into kept changing, so I kept changing my [screen] name. I
didn’t want to keep changing my name every time I grew out of the meaning, so I was like, ‘Ok, I’m just
going to pick a string of letters that doesn’t mean anything. It’ll always be me and refer to whatever it is that I’m doing.’
I picked letters that were ambiguous so I could use them everywhere and that would be easy to type, that weren’t
taken as a screen name. A few years later, I was like, ‘I should purchase that as a website.’ And then it turned
into the name of my comic.
For comics, what I grew up reading were “Far Side”
collections, “Calvin and Hobbes” collections — any strips with gags in them I would just read over and over. I’m not proud of this, but I read every “Garfield” strip published between when it started in like 1970-whatever
and 1997 or ‘98, which if you do the math, is a little too old to be reading “Garfield.” I would check them out in
blocks from the library and read them and check them back in. I read a lot of gag comics that were like four panels
and a punch line or one panel and a joke. And of course there’s lots of math and science and people who are really
good at explaining things like Richard Feynman, who was good at finding analogies and how to explain stuff.
People who do charts and graphs and theories, like Edward Tufte. Just stuff I like to read, and that probably ends
up like how I draw things.
Well, if you’re not good enough at either one you kind of
have to get things to work by doing both of them [laughs]. Who knows what I’ll end up doing? Maybe I’ll get
tired of this and go back to school. I feel like I could have been decent as a physicist, and when I was little I
wanted to do cartooning and maybe I would have been OK at that if I practiced a ton. There’s a lot less
competition in doing both. There are fewer people doing it so it’s easier to do stuff people like.
If I’m feeling really lazy one day, I don’t have to put a
chair in the comic, but there usually have to be people. If I make the people too complicated, then it’s going to be complicated every strip. That’s part of it. A big trend in humor comics over the last half-century is toward more
minimal illustration, because the medium is changing. Now, with Web comics, things are totally different. If you’re
telling a joke it’s sometimes easy to put in too much detail. Whittling away a lot of the extra stuff means that
it’s just the joke. When you tell ‘a guy walks into a bar …’ having too much detail about the bar doesn’t really
improve the strength of the punch line. All styles have their pluses and minuses. I think I just didn’t know how to draw
cartoon people, but I’ve been drawing stick figures since I was a little kid. And stuff like the chairs, a lot of
that is just doodling a long time. Like your signature may not even look like your name, but it looks the same every time.
There are only a few variables to work with. The arms just have a couple poses. Sometimes I run into a problem with ‘how
do I make this guy look angry?’ I don’t think it’s any special talent that I have; I’ve just drawn so many
stick figures, eventually if I want to draw an angry stick figure, I know how to make them look away or toward
something or how to tilt their heads. I just avoid emotions that are too complicated [laughs].
Part of it is just luck, being in the right place at the
right time. When I put out “xkcd,” Web comics were focused on anime and video games. I wasn’t really thinking about that
so I found an audience because there wasn’t a lot of stuff for them. There are a lot of things that are easy to
do wrong. It sounds obvious, but if you have a website where you have some kind of thing you’re making and you
want to look at, make it really easy to find the thing and look at it! You have to make it very clear to [site
visitors] the things you want them to know about.
I work with someone who runs the servers and programs the
store we’re using. There’s a lot of stuff that has to get done and has to get done at a certain time, and he’s
figured out that it’s not going to get done if I have to do it [laughs]. So he’s taken over. I do comics, and now and
then I’ll draw something that’ll turn into a product like a Tshirt or a poster.
He manages a lot of the mechanics of that. The rest of the time we try to find
interesting projects to work on that either will turn into business things or
will just be something cool that nobody else has done. With comics, if you go
into it thinking ‘I want to be a business success’ and not worry about what you’re
doing, it tends to not work out so well. We have a variety of projects in the
pipeline now, and several of them are things where there’s no real obvious
business benefit. But because of that it’s the kind of thing no one’s bothered
to do. If you keep doing cool stuff that people really want, that ultimately is
better for whatever business you’re doing, at least for something like this.
Not enough [laughs]. I did an internship after I
graduated, working on a 3-D virtual reality project. And then I got hired and did some really cool work on robotics. We were
building demo robots to show off various technologies that were being built by other projects. I did programming
and troubleshooting and debug for that. I was in over my head on the programming and the project goals were
really vague. Then the contracts ran out, and at that time I started selling T-shirts, and that was making more money
than doing these contract jobs, so I started doing that full time.
Terry Pratchett is a super-popular fantasy author, one of
my favorites. [Pratchett is the author of the best-selling Discworld
series.]
He did something with the nuclear industry, and he said there was a point when
he sat down and did the math and realized that every day he went to
the office instead of staying home and writing, he was losing money. I hit that point where [“xkcd”] was actually
my job because it was paying my rent. So I focused on that.
I can always pick it out anywhere in the sky. What I don’t
like about all the other constellations is that they depend on your perspective from earth. If you look at Orion, those stars aren’t near each other at all. The Pleiades looks like a star cluster, and it actually is a star cluster,
not fake like all the other constellations.
