xkcd: the exclusive interview

A fan of Randall Munroe's brilliant webcomic xkcd? Well, today we've got an exclusive interview with the stickmeister himself, just in time for the release of his first book: Volume 0 recently published by our friends over @Breadpig.com. Plus, we're going to give you a chance to win a free copy of the book! (stick around and see details at the end of the post) But first, the interview...

DI: For the ignorant among us, or those too lazy to check out your Web site: what's the deal with xkcd? What's it stand for and why do you insist on making me feel like a moron who can't figure out how to pronounce it?

RM: I can't pronounce it either, although I once saw someone argue that linguistically, each letter is silent. As for where it came from, sometime back in 1999 I picked a set of random letters to which to stake my claim, so that it would always mean what I wanted and nothing else. So I wanted something with no pronunciation, something that didn't make an acronym, and which didn't look like any other word. And something which was short, so I could type it fast!

DI: I heard before you became Digg and Reddit's most famous cartoonist, you were working on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. Um, honestly?

RM: Yup! But it's not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. I spent one summer interning working on a student-run virtual reality project, and was hired the next year to work on another section of the base on a project building a little R2-D2-sized robot that was serving as a testbed/demo platform for some technologies other groups were working on. It was pretty standard programming work, and I was only there a year or so before leaving to do xkcd full time.

DI: I don't know how much you know about us _flosser, but we're on a mission to take over the blogosphere. How much do we have to pay you to put our URL or some branded rat-a-tat in your next comic?

RM: Oh, I'm not sure you want that. I did a comic early on about Cory Doctorow wearing a red cape and goggles while he blogs, and I don't think he'll ever live the image down.

RM: Really, we weren't looking for a publisher. The normal role of a publisher is to give you an advance, oversee the distribution of your book, negotiate with retailers, and take most of the profit. Since the main potential readership for an xkcd collection is already connected to me through my site, I wasn't looking for bookstore distribution, so I wasn't even sure I needed a publisher at all. My business partner, Derek, was talking with my friend Alexis [Ohanian] about what we'd want in a book, and Alexis thought he and Breadpig could fill the reduced role pretty well (finding printers and scheduling a basic tour). The idea sounded good to me, so we went with it.

DI: Is it true that some of the proceeds go to charity?

RM: A portion of the proceeds went to Room to Read, which was suggested by Alexis. It's a great charity which builds schools in countries where they're needed. The world's got a lot of problems and I sure don't have the answers, but there's a great Aristotle quote that's something like, "All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." So education is as good a place to start as any.

DI: People often ask songwriters, "Which comes first? The music or the words?" Likewise, I wonder: Which comes first for you? The setup/scene or the punchline?

DI: Because your characters rarely have distinguishing characteristics--one of the things I love about them, btw--when you're writing them, are you thinking: "Oh, this is a gag THIS character would say" rather than "Oh, this is a gag THAT character would say"? Or are the generic-looking characters more or less the same person in your mind?

RM: The generic-looking characters don't have particularly consistent identities, and from looking carefully at comics it's clear there are several of each. But I try to make sure the focus is on the conversation or the activities and not on trying to figure out how the character who's talking fits into previous strips.

DI: What are some of your favorite comics?

RM: I read comics by some of my friends pretty regularly -- among many others, there's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zach Weiner, Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content, A Softer World by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, and Cyanide and Happiness, which is by four or eight different very nice guys. A couple of comics I really like have ended -- Men in Hats by Aaron Farber and Minus by Ryan Armand. And one of my favorite comics ended some time ago but restarted -- Buttercup Festival, by David Troupes.

DI: Besides other comics, where do you, er, draw inspiration from?

RM: Arguments with my friends, when we're competing to try to be as clever as possible. That, and my ongoing frustrations trying to get various pieces of software to work properly. The problems I manage to create are notorious for their absurdity -- some of my sysadmin friends spend a lot of time doing double-takes. I frequently hear things like, "how did you manage to break that?"

DI: If you could sit down and have lunch with any comic strip character in history, who would it be and what would you want to know?

RM: If we're limited specifically to comic strips, I think lunch with Huey from The Boondocks would be a lot of fun. We could be angry, nerdy, and self-righteous about things for a while, and then heckle politicians and bad movies together. But if we can broaden the constraints slightly, I'd pick Wile E. Coyote; I desperately want to give him a tutorial on basic engineering and physics vis-a-vis Roadrunner-catching.

Win a copy of the new xkcd book! Here's how: Mosey on over to the xkcd store. Poke around! Then, find the missing word in this tagline: A webstore of romance, sarcasm, ____ and language. Next, head over Breadpig's blog. Answer the questions you find there and send your answers, along with the missing word from the tagline, to: AnotherAwesomeMFContest@gmail.com. Everyone with the right answers is automatically entered into a drawing for the book. It's that simple.