I’m not a very big fan of short-form comics. I spent over 30 years reading newspaper comic strips with their bland inoffensive humor and lack of continuity, and encountered very few strips that had much in the way of continuity or of actual humor. The occasional stand-outs in the field managed to shine because they found a way to stand out; Farside had a quirky and bizarre humor that rarely missed the mark, and strips such as Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes won me over due to sheer imagination… at least when compared to their peers. Still, few short-form webcomics really caught my interest, especially with the tremendous selection of comics available.

xkcd sticks out of the sea of short-form webcomics for two reasons. First, it is a stick-figure comic, and a fairly simplistically-drawn one at that (unlike the sleek and colored stick-figures from Order of the Stick). This is an artistic decision that was chosen as even with his early works, artist Randall Munroe revealed some skill in drawing. When Munroe shifts his focus away from the stick figures, this shows. Nor is it just physical art where it shows; the comic can shift from the simplistic stick figures to surreal landscapes to mathematical graphs and functions. It shows a level of imagination that is lacking in far too many comics. Second, its humor works on multiple levels, on a visceral and a cerebral level.

As with most short-form comics, continuity has crept into the strip. There are regular characters (though they remain without names) that are only differentiated by hair, dialogue, and in one case a hat. Indeed, a micro-storyline even erupted over three strips between the hat man and a young stick figure lady who managed, briefly, to one-up his maliciousness with smug superiority. (And it is entirely too amusing to see that the hat man use a submarine to track down the young lady who stole his hat… solely to retrieve it.) For the most part, xkcd remains the domain of one-shots and word plays that require no in-depth archive crawl. Indeed, you could start reading with the current strip, and never look back… but where’s the fun of that?