eXtreme Kaleidoscope Color Division

There is no real meaning to the name behind the greatest new kid on the block. When the big guns are asked what it takes to succeed at webcomics they usually chuckle and say start before the year 2000. That’s only funny because you can probably name on one hand every comic which has succeed that has started less then four years ago. It’s even taken for granted that every webcomic will not be known the first year and then will barely break even given another year. That was before Randall Munroe laughed in our faces and divided by zero. xkcd is a comic started in Sept of 2005 with literal notebook doodles. I defy you to find anything with less artistic skill behind it!

That’s not why the fans come to the site in droves. It takes the complexity of romance, sarcasm, math, and language to deliver plain simple fun. The novel approach is so addictive that thousands upon thousands of readers have become the sort of dedicated fan every artist is dumb-founded by. All you have to do is read about how a thousand of them, on a whim, showed up at exactly 2:38 pm on September 23, 2007 to meet a dream girl.

The meet-up was prompted by a March comic entitled “Dream Girl,” in which Munroe’s stick-figure narrator recounts meeting a girl in a dream who urgently whispered a date and time and the mapping coordinates — 42.39561, -71.13051 — of Williams Park in his ear. The narrator goes there at the appointed moment but, as he sadly concludes, “It turns out wanting something doesn’t make it real.”

Although some dreams may not come through I certainly believe having a thousand random people show up with almost no prompting satisfies another. The xkcd affect is even wider spread as Randal gained some of his first fame for mapping out the internet. This was recently followed up by the actual survey being conducted recently by the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. Not only has he been able to quit his job but he gets a page in history. How’s that for a two year old?

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