xkcd is a webcomic that makes its home on xkcd.com. And what a webcomic! I think it's consistently better than pretty much any you'll find in your local paper.

How many?

As of February 27, 2007, there have been 227, A new one comes out each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Who? About?

You mean who are the characters or who wrote it? Well, I guess it's kind of the same. The characters are stick figures and often represent the author, Randall Munroe. He's a physicist who used to work at NASA. With robots. Big stompy Martian-killing robots of DOOM! (But they're top secret, so you didn't hear it from me.)

Redalien adds: 'Randall is also a lovely man! He's given the computer science society at the university of bristol permission to reproduce one of his comics for profit. The others are, of course, creative commonsed.' (links mine)

The content is the musings, fears (especially of velociraptors), and thoughts of the author, someone cooler than any of us. He's a geek--he sees math and physics everywhere. Sometimes they're very sweet, but unlike some comics, he remembers to be funny at the same time. To be honest, it reminds of a geeky Pearls Before Swine¹. And who doesn't like Pearls Before Swine? Sometimes it reminds me a little of Calvin and Hobbes.² Other times it's just what it is. (phraggle says it reminds him of E2: 'geeky and beautiful'.)

Okay, maybe you won't fully understand every joke. You'll laugh anyway.

Oh, and just so you know, always check for title attributes on the comic. This can be done by holding the mouse cursor over it. Sometimes there's an brief explanation of the joke. Usually, just relevant line. It's like a minijoke to go with the comic. Delightful!

The Name

It's not an initialism. From the about page: 'It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It stands for the comic and everything the comic stands for!' And that's just what a name is supposed to do, is it not?

• ¹ Examples: http://xkcd.com/c193.html and http://xkcd.com/c108.html
• ² Example: http://xkcd.com/c209.html

Since the date on the last writeup, the popularity of xkcd has become even more ubiquitous. xkcd seems to have replaced The Onion as the common ground for geek discussion. The words "oh, this is just like the one xkcd strip..." are now a conversational touchstone. How did xkcd so quickly insinuate itself into our consciousness?

One of the things barely mentioned in the above writeup is the actual art on the strip. The art is, to say the least, minimalistic. The most typical strip or panel involves stick figures, without faces, talking with each other. Some strips or panels are even more bare, featuring a simple chart or graph. Is the success of Randall Munroe simple luck, then? Or even worse, is he simply deluding hordes of geeks by giving them the Linux references they want, without actually having any talent?

I think that that is not the case. Although it may be an example of judging things in hindsight, I think that the stick figures used in the strip do manage to convey a lot of emotion and meaning in fairly simple motions and postures. When Scott Adams' Dilbert strip became popular, it was also the simplest drawn strip on the comic page, but also managed to communicate to people about familiar situations. Going further back, Charles Schultz's Peanuts strip was also fairly simple artistically, but managed to gain people's sympathy using just the lines around Charlie Brown's eyes. I think this is part of what makes the strip's art meaningful and popular---there are some very emotive stick figures. The other aspect of the strip's art is that some of the strips show a lot of artistic creativity and skill. Occasionally, the characters move around in dramatic, surrealistic landscapes, and some of the tricks and visual jokes, such as strips dealing with recursion and dream sequences, are quite sophisticated. Two recent strips focusing on logarithmic pictures of the universe I found especially artistically and scientifically well done.

For all of those reasons, I believe that xkcd is well done, and has some staying power, and is not just about using or abusing geek cred.