★★★★★ For hard-core XKCD megafans

xkcd volume 0

Randall Munroe

The first thing to know about xkcd: volume 0 is that it consists mostly of comics that are available free online at Randall Munroe's XKCD website. Randall Munroe points this out in the first sentence of his Introduction. (I am not counting "Hi!" as a sentence.) You'd have to be either an XKCD superfan or a fiscally irresponsible idiot (these may not be disjoint sets) to pay for a book whose contents are available for free. Or maybe you think it will one day become a super-valuable collector's item that you can sell for thousands of dollars on eBay. I personally count myself a member of the superfan set, and also at times as someone whose actions mimic those of a fiscally responsible idiot.

Published in 2009, xkcd: volume 0 is about the earliest days of XKCD, which began in 2006, and is still going stronger than ever in 2022. Still, it includes my all-time favorite comic:

#162: Angular momentum:

This is perhaps the most romantic comic about angular momentum ever published. (To be sure, competition in the category "Romantic comics about angular momentum" is not extraordinarily stiff.)

For those who have already read the comics free online, the question naturally arises, "Is there anything in the book that is not available in the online comics?" There is! The most interesting to me was the three page introduction telling of how XKCD came to be. (The name, it turns out, is just a random four-letter domain name that Munroe happened to have lying around unused when he uploaded the first comics to show to some friends.)

But wait! There's more! Here is a pair of pages from the book:

The book is published with a Creative Commons license, which makes it perfectly OK for me to show you pages, as long as I'm not making money by doing so and tell you where they came from. Some things you will notice: First, and most obvious, are the three comics on these two pages. If you look closely below the lower right corner of each, you will see some tiny text -- this is the mouseover text with which the comic was first published online. You may also notice the page numbers 11 and 12. Pages are numbered in skew binary -- I cheated and wrote decimal page numbers in my copy. In decimal, these are pages 4 and 5. You will also notice some stuff in red outside the comics. The picture of someone, perhaps Munroe, holding a cat obviously relates to the comic to its right. On the right-hand edge of page 11 (= 4) you see a sitting figure and some cryptic text. Much of the red-ink marginalia are like this: encoded puzzles. Some are obvious, e.g. on p 10101 = 39 is a series of stick figures which are probably related to the Sherlock Holmes Dancing Men cipher. I was too lazy to try to figure out the puzzles on my own. I was not too lazy to try to find solutions on the Internet, but I mostly struck out there. I imagine they were once out there, but have over the last 13 years succumbed to linkrot. I understand that several of them reveal a secret XKCD meeting which took place in San Francisco 26-June-2010. (See "XKCD volume 0 service pack 1".)

The comics also include purity, which I like because I am a mathematician:

#435: Purity:

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

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