Just Start: How to create a world-changing comic (when you can't draw)

Something is right on the internet

When he was in high school, Randall Munroe spent a lot of time drawing in his notebooks.  “I spent a lot of time making charts, solving math problems and doing other things in the margins,” he told one interviewer. “Instead of doing what I was supposed to do, I drew maps and stick figure battles. Every time I had to hand in an assignment, I didn't want to, because I had made something that I wanted to keep…I was an okay student, not a great student. In the end, those notes started to stack up faster than my school books.” 

By the time he graduated from university, Munroe’s stacks of notebooks were so high that he started to scan them into a computer — and, after he found a few he liked enough, to post them online. Some were funny, some didn’t quite work, but none, at this point, were works of art — Munroe stuck with drawing stick figures, keeping the art basic and concentrating on the ideas in his strips.

It was the ideas that caught on. One early strip featuring a joke about Linux’s “sudo” command (it’s short for "superuser do", and refers to a command that an operating system that will obey with administrator-level privileges, in this case compelling one character to make another a sandwich) was so popular with programmers that Munroe started selling t-shirts with it on. Before long, he was selling so many t-shirts, featuring that strip and others, that he was making more money doing it than he did working in one of NASA's robot labs. Another strip, published on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow, became wildly popular by identifying one of the common problems with online passwords — they’re easy for hackers to guess, but hard for users to remember. 

The secret of Munroe’s early popularity, then, was that he used what he knew. He wasn’t the funniest person on the internet or the most knowledgeable about programming — and he certainly wasn’t the best artist — but by having together a little bit of expertise in each area and putting it online regularly, he built a devoted following. XKCD would evolve into “a webcomic about romance, sarcasm, math, and language," sometimes featuring jokes so simple that anyone can get them, sometimes using obscure scientific in-jokes or pop-culture references, or sometimes abandoning the traditional comic strip format in favour of charts, graphs and diagrams that combine all of the above. 

And when Munroe wanted to push the creative envelope with XKCD, he once again used what he had: using his programming expertise to create “click and drag”, a four-panel strip in which the final image can be dragged around with a mouse to reveal a huge landscape filled with unexpected details, clever in-jokes, and relaxing views. If the whole thing was printed out at the size most browsers saw it, it would be 14 metres wide and almost six metres tall — so it’s actually made up of many smaller images arranged in a grid, with each one loaded as you pan and zoom around the larger image.

There might be hundreds (or even thousands) of artists making web comics who can draw better than Munroe, but that doesn’t matter — by coming at the problem from a different angle, and looking at things with a coder’s mindset, he made a piece of art unlike anything bored browsers had seen before (he followed it up a year later with “Time”, a single panel that updated regularly for 123 days, ending with a total of 3,102 unique images). 

The reason I find all of this fascinating is, XKCD has, in many ways, changed the world: it’s brought science and maths concepts both important and silly to a huge audience, produced some of the internet's most iconic data visualizations, highlighted important issues in relatable ways and created some enduring memes. But when it started, Randall Munroe couldn’t really even draw! The comic’s still stick figures now, but when it started, they were even wobblier than their current iterations. You might have read this Scott Adams quote before:

“I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”

Munroe’s story is similar, except that he started out much worse than Adams at drawing (these days, I think there’s an argument that his silhouettes have a sort of sparse beauty that doesn’t get done much in other artforms). But he found the intersection between what he could do, a bit, and all the other interests, and it caught on.

If there’s a lesson here, I think it’s just start. The intersection of my interests (BJJ, piano, learning stuff, and writing) is the reason I started my YouTube channel, and these days I’m a lot better at it than I was two years ago. You, probably, have a combination of interests that nobody else in the world has — and even if you don’t have a way of communicating that to the world now, it’s easy(ish) to find one if that’s something you want to do. Just start.

Have a great weekend!
Joel x

Stuff I like

📝 Article - The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano

This piece was fantastic at articulating something I haven’t really thought about before: that Tony Soprano’s allure comes, not from his power (which is something you need to actually struggle up the hierarchy of life to get) but from his competence and ability to handle stuff (which is something pretty much any of us can achieve). Something to think about, anyway.

🎮 Videogame - Animal Well

These days, I like my videogames dialogue-free and meditative, and so I loved this little platform puzzler where you’re dropped into a world with little instruction and left to uncover its secrets at your own pace. Cute, dark, and a little bit whimsical.

🎥 Film - The Wild Robot

I went to see this with my 7-year-old and it was delightful: it’s an adaptation of a book about a robot that adopts an orphaned gosling, but funnier and more charming than it really needed to be.

🧐 This week I learned

“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

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