[Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of some of my favorite webcomics creator interviews that previously ran on WizardUniverse.com and were a part of the site’s archives that are no longer hosted there. This was one of those chats that was almost intimidating to gear up for, being that xkcd’s Randall Munroe may be one of the smartest webcomickers out there. It was originally posted on July 27, 2007.]
It’s really easy to make a bad comic out of stick figures. I’ve been churning them out and handily irking authority figures with such images since preschool. Randall Munroe, by contrast, has elevated stick-figure diagrams to high and hilarious art. If there’s a genre in which to pigeonhole xkcd, the comic belongs atop the heap of nerdy jokes doodled every day during boring physics lectures around the world which, unsurprisingly enough, is how xkcd got its start.
It’s hard to imagine a cooler job than testing out cutting-edge robots for NASA, which Munroe freely admits, but imagining another job is exactly what he did, and now he has a fulltime gig as a webcomicker. Munroe took a break from work for a quick “Cursory Conversation” about which is cooler: making robots or making comics; as well as to talk about how xkcd got to where it is now and, thankfully for xkcd readers everywhere, how one is supposed to pronounce its title.
BRIAN WARMOTH: When you say your webcomic’s name in conversation how do you refer to it?
RANDALL MUNROE: I say “X-K-C-D” and I’ve noticed sometimes when I try to say it fast I often skip over the “C” and so it’s like “X-K-D” or something like that.
I read the description of the comic’s name on your site and you said it’s not supposed to be an acronym for anything. So how did you put those letters together?
MUNROE: I was sitting up very late one night. I was trying to pick a screen name on AOL or one of their related services and I was trying to come up with a text to represent me unambiguously. So I thought, “Okay, I want a short group of letters and nothing with meaning or nothing with any obvious interpretations,“ and so I just started picking letters that I kind of liked that couldn’t be confused with other letters and that looked good together without any pronunciation. I wanted the “L” in there, but “L” can be confused with “I,” like a lowercase “L” and a capital “I.” So I went through a number of them that were already registered screen names until I finally hit “xkcd.” The whole plan was to do it unambiguously representing me, and then I ruined that by making it into a comic, so now it’s not clear whether “xkcd” means me or my comic or what.