xkcd: Global Reach

Although xkcd’s audience does not particularly exemplify a global one, it taps into a specific community for an audience. Because xkcd’s author, Randall Munroe, majored in Physics back in college, a lot of his content connects back to his studies. They are very scientific sometimes and at other times they are more philosophical or meta. And these more “nerdy” topics help Munroe to gain audiences who are interested in them. His comics teaches others and have active discussions about a lot of scientific principles. Just like how some webcomics manage to teach its audience another culture, this one helps to teach science [1]. In conjunction with his scientific writing, Munroe uses some special features of the web to help him attract more audience [2]. For example, he uses the web’s infinite canvas to draw extremely long or wide strips that would otherwise not be possible on paper. Anyone who has actually read xkcd’s about page or any of its written descriptions will find them very relaxed and informal. Thanks to the freedom and the autonomy of the web, this writing style is capable of taking off without being hindered [3].

Although the site itself does not directly promote a global audience, Randall Munroe’s fan base grew due to his strategy of targeting the scientific community. These helpful fans have, for example, translated Munroe’s pages into multiple languages. The expansive web helped to create and shape Munroe’s art pieces into global ones and at no charge. Fans who set up communities and translate pages, do these things out of their own good will and simply for the enjoyment of others. This artifact not only demonstrates how Munroe’s comic become a global phenomenon through targeting audience, using special features, and taking advantage of the lax web environment, it also demonstrates the power of the internet. A strong fan base will help to spread the webcomic nationally and globally by translating the comics into different languages and having constant discussions about it. From this example, we can see that for a webcomic to take off on a global scale one does not need to deliberately target a global audience, but instead need to have a firm fan base.

1. Hong, Wei-Chen, and Shelley Shwu-Ching Young. "Playing webcomic-based game on Facebook for learning Chinese festivals." In International Conference on Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment, pp. 185-189. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

2. Dowthwaite, Liz, R. J. Houghton, and Richard Mortier. "Fame or Function? How webcomic artists choose where to share." Contemporary issues in ergonomics and human factors(2015): 355-362.

3. Masvoulas, Dimitrios. "Understanding Webcomics: the implications of Internet technologies for Editorial Cartoonists and Comics Journalists." (2014).