Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Back-story of His Epic, 3,099-Panel 'Time' Comic

vikingpower writes "Randall Munroe, the comic author best known as the creator of the xkcd webcomic, reveals the secret backstory of his epic, 3099-panel 'Time' strip in an interesting interview with Wired. He says, 'In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more ... The Earth’s axis wobbles over the millennia, and some individual stars move visibly, so I used a few different pieces of astronomy software–with a lot of hand correction and tweaking–to render the future night sky. When the Sun sets in the night sequence, one of the first things you see is the gap where Antares should be, which was the first clue that this is taking place in the far future. Later in the night–which lasted for several days of real time–more astronomical details let readers pin down the date more precisely.' The comic can be seen as an animation on YouTube. There is also a complete click-through version available on geekwagon. This comic inspired a dedicated wiki and has its own glossary."

Comments

Re:xkcd is overrated

[Maxo-Texas]

I find many of his comics to be creative in a way that stretches my brain.

For example the recursive WikiLeaks comic, the dnd game with death, "something is wrong on the internet", and others.

I agree that I find some other writers more emotionally effecting (The story of Miko in Order of the Stick literally made me cry-- over stick figures!) or more creative and artistic (Questionable Content) but XKCD is +5 Insightful compared to those. He's a mirror on society- not a story teller so much.

If he wrote SF it would mostly be hard SF I think.

And his illustrations (Cancer, Radiation, Ocean Depths) are spectacular and unique. Here he shows a singular talent.

I think only someone who was in the vast minority or extremely jealous would call Munroe embarrassing. But, as I found in leading MMORGS guilds, there is always "that guy" who will argue with you about anything. Even if you want to give him a $20 bill. I guess you're "that guy".

Re:Please...

[GreenTech11]

It was for lack of better terminology, an entirely new way of doing a webcomic. Usually XKCD updates 3 times a week, with a new URL for each one (and very rarely do stories continue across updates), Time updated every 30 minutes at the same URL, initially with minute variations, which lots of the regular viewers missed for quite a while. The complete lack of dialogue for the first 100 or so frames meant that people were being challenged to create their own backstory. The story itself also got grander in scope as it progressed, with subtle hints towards the setting being given. That it went for months, and over 3000 frames (which when viewed are effectively a stop-motion movie), is also unprecedented to my knowledge. It also managed to spawn a thread which managed to stay on-topic for over 50000 posts, (as well as a whole pile of jargon within that thread.)

It isn't the greatest story ever told, but the method of presentation (particularly the enforced wait between frames which leads to great speculation), subtle hints which rely on not insignificant prior knowledge (the time-period was placed by a particularly beautiful, and accurate, rendering of the night sky which was presented over a period of days), make it unique.